Students receive Holland awards at INBRE conference

Brandon Mizner, Andrea Gilkey, Catherine Sargus, UNMC’s Dr. David Crouse (Board Member of NCLC), Victoria Kohout (executive director of the Nebraska Coalition of Lifesaving Cures), D.J. Nawandar, Julia Warnke and Kyla Ronhovde at the recent INBRE conference in Grand Island. Minzer, Gilkey, Sargus, Nawandar, Warnke and Ronhovde each received Richard Holland Future Scientist Awards at the conference.

Six undergraduate students from four Nebraska colleges and universities recently received the 2009 Richard Holland Future Scientist Award from the Nebraska Coalition for Lifesaving Cures.

The awards were announced Aug. 6 at the annual conference in Grand Island for students in the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) Program.

These top six students, selected by INBRE faculty associates, received monetary awards from the Nebraska Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, totaling $2,700.

The awards were named in honor of Richard Holland, an Omaha philanthropist and longtime supporter of research.

About INBRE Established in 2001, the INBRE program was created to: Expose students to serious biomedical research; Build a statewide biomedical research infrastructure between undergraduate and graduate institutions; and Strengthen each undergraduate institution’s infrastructure and increase its capacity to conduct cutting-edge biomedical and behavioral research. The program is directed by James Turpen, Ph.D., a professor in the UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy and principal investigator of the $17.2 million National Institutes of Health grant that supports the program. For more information on the INBRE program, contact Dr. Turpen at 559-4388 or jturpen@unmc.edu.

Sanford Goodman, president of the coalition, said this was a well deserving group of individuals to honor.

“These students represent the future of research in the state of Nebraska,” Goodman said. “The Nebraska Coalition for Lifesaving Cures is proud to recognize and reward their achievements.”

The winners of the 2009 Richard Holland Future Scientist award in the oral presentation category were:

• 1st place — Catherine Sargus, LaVista, Neb., University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), “Elongation of procine embryos in vitro using alginate hydrogels as a three-dimensional extracellular matrix.”
  
• 2nd place — Brandon Mizner, Grand Island, University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), “Nox4 in Mitochondria: A possible link between NADPH oxidase and mitochondria in Angiotensin II Intraneuronal signaling.”
  
• 3rd place — D.J. Narwandar, University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), “Knock down of CSCR2 enhances sensitivity to chemotherapy.”

The winners of the 2009 Richard Holland Future Scientist award in the poster presentation category were:

• 1st place — Julia Warneke, Omaha, UNO, “A new graph theoretic approach to the assembly of short read sequences.”
  
• 2nd place — Kyla Ronhovde, Lincoln, Doane College, “The role of methylmalonate semialdehyde dehydrogenase in Arabidopsis thaliana germination.”
  
• 3rd place — Andrea Gilkey, UNL “Anthropometric evaluation of suit-seat Interface.”