UNMC student shines in research competition

UNMC’s Tyler Kambis took second place in Research!America’s national “flash talks” competition.

The competition took place during Research!America’s National Health Research Forum in September.

Kambis is a graduate research assistant in the UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy and a PhD candidate in the lab of Paras Mishra, PhD, associate professor in the UNMC Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology,

Kambis was one of about a dozen competitors, including researchers from the University of Notre Dame and Cornell, who had to summarize their research in under three minutes live to an audience of policy advocates, industry veterans, politicians and academics.

In his presentation, titled “Using the Wrong Fuel for the Right Job,” Kambis described the importance of cardiac metabolism to the development of heart disease in diabetic patients.

“Instead of focusing on complex pathways and molecules, I decided to draw comparisons between our world’s energy crisis with the diabetic heart’s energy crisis,” he said. “The most nerve-wracking part was boiling down my entire thesis project into three minutes.”

Kambis said the competition was an outstanding experience.

“It was a great chance to step out from behind the bench and show how exciting biomedical science is to a layperson audience.

“Tyler has done an outstanding job,” Dr. Mishra said. “Competitions like this are important because they teach graduate students how critical it is to be able to communicate your project in the shortest amount of time possible.”