Summer undergraduate research poster session to be held at SMHS on Aug. 4

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend the Summer Undergraduate Research poster session on Thursday, Aug. 4, at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS). The one-day event will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on the second floor of the UND SMHS building at 1301 North Columbia Road, Grand Forks, N.D.

For the past 10 weeks, 52 students from UND, as well as from rural and tribal colleges in North Dakota, Minnesota, and across the nation, have conducted research and participated in a number of related educational activities. Students worked shoulder-to-shoulder with their mentor scientists from the UND Department of Biology, the UND SMHS Departments of Pathology and Biomedical Sciences, and Cankdeska Cikana Community College.

This year, undergraduates participating in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), which is based in the Interdisciplinary Renewable and Environmental Collaborative REU Program (IREC), will join the poster session.

One of the goals of the summer research program is to provide students with the opportunity to work directly with an established research scientist. An additional goal is to bolster the supply of biological and biomedical research scientists and healthcare professionals.

Over the course of the summer, students received specialized laboratory training. In weekly professional development sessions, undergraduates learned about a variety of research areas, how to conduct research responsibly, and the basics of the graduate and medical school application process. At the end of the summer, students present their research work in an on-campus poster session. Their research has implications in the areas of cancer, drug addiction, epigenetics, Lyme disease, and neurological disease. Other research projects included environmental influences on regulation of cortical development and function, dynamics of cell-fate choice and cell state transitions, immune/brain system interactions, learning and memory, neural stem cell fate, sex-determination in turtles, stress tolerance in nematodes, and wing development in moths.

In addition to UND, this year’s participants are from Beloit College, Beloit, Wis.; Cankdeska Cikana Community College, Fort Totten, N.D.; College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, St. Joseph, Minn.; Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.; Cottey College, Nevada, Mo; Dickinson State University, Dickinson, N.D.; Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Wash.; Greenville University, Greenville, Ill.; Hendrix College, Conway, Ark.; Guilford College, Greensboro, N.C.; Middle Georgia State University, Macon, Ga.; Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore.; Ouachita Baptist University, Arkadelphia, Ark.; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Ill.; University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Md.; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minn.; University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, Wis.; Valley City State University, Valley City, N.D.; Vermillion Community College, Ely, Minn.

Funding for the students came from a variety of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and Office of the Dean at the UND SMHS.