For Your Health
For Your Health

News from the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences

SMHS grad students win awards at UND’s annual Graduate Research Achievement Day

Congratulations are in order to Danielle Germundson and Sonalika Singhal, graduate students in Clinical & Translational Sciences, who won first and third place, respectively, in the natural sciences category at UND’s fifth annual (virtual) Graduate Research Achievement Day (GRAD) event last week.

“Graduate students are really the lifeblood of any research university; they are the intellectual fuel that drives the research engine forward,” said Chris Nelson, associate dean in UND’s School of Graduate Studies. “The high quality of research on display by all of our presenters was apparent in the very high ratings received.”

Germundson’s presentation was entitled “Food for thought: Brain pathology changes in a mouse model of mild milk allergy” and Singhal gave a poster called “Bladder Cancer risk prediction model for human exposed to arsenic: Gene expression analysis.”

Both students are conducting research within the SMHS Department of Pathology.

GRAD was started in 2017 with four goals in mind, Nelson said. Organizers wanted to encourage collaboration between disciplines, give students a place where they could showcase about their work, “Enhance Discovery at a Level Consistent with Most Research-Intensive Communities” (see Goal 4 of the UND Strategic Plan) and show the community the exceptional range of UND graduate students’ research.