Save the date: Summer undergraduate research poster session to be held at SMHS on Aug. 1
Students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend the Summer Undergraduate Research poster session on Thursday, Aug. 1, 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, 1301 N. Columbia Rd., Grand Forks.
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, Cankdeska Cikana Community College, Turtle Mountain Community College, and Sitting Bull Community College.
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 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, soil health and function, and biodiversity of prairie pollinators.
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.
