Biomed students among winners at bilogical engineering conference
Reprinted with permission of
Creating Tomorrow: USU College of Engineering magazine, Fall 2009
Biological engineering students were definitely overrepresented on the winners' podium at the national conference of the Institute of Biological Engineering in March. Of the nine awards offered in student categories, USU students brought home five.
Two hundred attendees from 40 national and international universities, private industry, and federal government units participated through platform and poster presentations held in San Jose, California.
Financial support to attend the conference came from the Graduate Student Senate, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Biological Engineering program, individual faculty advisors and mentors, and the students themselves who paid for their own food!
In the Undergraduate Student Poster competition, Sara Bailey won second place with "Strategies for Nutrient Removal from Municipal Wastewater and Biodiesel Production through Controlled Algae Growth;" and Eric Monson and Andrew Vanderwerf took third place with "Novel Copy Number Variation (CNV) Detection Methodology for Complement Genes C4A and C4B Utilizing SYBR Green Dye Chemistry." Bailey is mentored by Drs. Sridhar Viamajala and Rondald Sims; the other students are mentored by Dr. Anthony Tores.
Graduate Student Poster competition winners included Elisabeth Linton and Trent Mortensen who won first place with "Efficient Systems for Monitoring and Recovering Polyhydroxyalkanoates" and Mortensen also taking third place with "Inhibitory Effectiveness of St.-John-Wort-Derived Compounds Against Mycobacterial Isolates." These students are mentored by Drs. Charles Miller and Sims, and Dean H. Scott Hinton.
Kirsten Sims placed third in the Bioethics Essay Competition.
