UNMC students to attend international forum in Tokyo

UNMC International Student Forum participants visit the Great Wall of China during their trip to last year’s forum. UNMC is sending students to this year’s forum, which will be held in late June in Tokyo.

For the second-straight year, UNMC will have student representatives at the International Student Forum, which will be held at the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo in late June.

UNMC will send 10 student delegates to the forum. Based on the extremely positive experience of last year’s delegates, the competition to be a delegate for this year’s forum is expected to be intense.

Along with the Japanese and UNMC delegates, the forum will include students from the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — last year’s hosts — and students from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

“The caliber of doctoral students selected from all of these prestigious universities and the depth of exchanges and sharing of presentations and research at these forums is extraordinary,” said Jialin Zheng, M.D., associate professor in the UNMC departments of pharmacology/experimental neuroscience and pathology/microbiology and director of the Asia Pacific Rim Development Program (APRDP). The APRDP office coordinates the selection of UNMC delegates each year.

“Attending these forums enables UNMC students to interact with their elite counterparts from around the world and further our mission of establishing UNMC’s reputation as one of the world’s leading institutions for biomedical research,” Dr. Zheng said.

Applications are now being accepted for the selection of UNMC’s delegates.

All UNMC students are welcome to apply. The forum places particular emphasis on students in graduate studies. Students from every departmental area are encouraged to apply in order to represent the broad spectrum of research being conducted at UNMC. All student participants will be required to give an oral presentation regarding their research during the forum.

There will be partial compensation of traveling expenses for those selected. The University of Tokyo will cover the meals and accommodation expenses for UNMC’s students and accompanying faculty, as well as the excursion costs to a trip to the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center.

Students may apply by sending an abstract of their current research, as well as department affiliation and current year of schooling to Emilie Scoggins at escoggins@unmc.edu. Scoggins can be reached by phone at 559-3791. The application deadline is March 9.

Attendees will be selected by a student and faculty panel based upon the submitted abstracts. For additional information about APRDP, visit the APRDP Web site at http://www.unmc.edu/dept/vcr/aprdp/.

The Asia Pacific Rim Development Program (APRDP) was inaugurated in 2005 with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between UNMC and two of China’s leading biomedical institutions.

Founded in 1892 as the “The Institute of Infectious Disease,” the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo (IMSUT) is Japan’s foremost research institute for medical life science.

IMSUT has more than 150 faculty members who work with 200 of the nation’s highest-rated graduate students in medicine, science, agriculture, pharmaceutical science and engineering. The institute’s mission is to develop more effective interdisciplinary research on basic life science and genomic medicine.