Nicole Barkley, a PhD candidate in the Biological Sciences Program will defend her PhD later this month and will begin a postdoctoral position in October at North Carolina Central with Dr.  Antonio Baines.  In this postdoctoral position Nicole will focus on teaching and research.  Nicole initially met Dr. Baines at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Meeting in Chicago in 2012 and again when he stopped by her poster  at the ABRCMS meeting in 2012 in San Jose, CA.  Hugo Tejeda, a PhD candidate in the Graduate Programs in Life Science (GPILS) Neuroscience Program at UMB will defend his PhD later this month and begin a postdoctoral position at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).  Lola Brown, a PhD candidate in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program will defend her PhD later this semester and will begin a postdoctoral position at  Yale University with Dr. Anjelica Gonzalez whose research focuses on developing skin grafts for pediatric burn victims.   Malachi Tatum, a PhD candidate in Physics will defend his PhD later this semester and will immediately begin a 2-year postdoctoral position with NASA in Greenbelt, MD.  Samuel Haile, a PhD candidate in the Biological Sciences program will defend his PhD this fall and has already been offered 3 postdoctoral positions - two at the University of Pennsylvania and one at the NIH with Dr. Crystal Mackall in the Center for Cancer Research in the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  During our visit to NCI last spring, Samuel had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Mackall and the members of her laboratory.  Samuel interviewed for all three positions in July and was offered all of them “on the spot”.  Samuel will begin his postdoctoral position at NIH in January 2014.   

In the recent competitive renewal submitted in 2012, we proposed a new component to our IMSD program called the  Speaker Exchange Program where IMSD graduate programs at other institutions would host IMSD graduate students from UMBC and UMB as presenters of scientific talks.  While visiting the host institution, IMSD graduates are to also select 3-4 mentors to meet with during the visit.  The goal  of this exchange is to expose IMSD Fellows to the exceptional research being conducted in academic labs outside of their own institutions.  Institutions with IMSD graduate programs at Brown, Emory, UNC Chapel Hill and Baylor are participants of the Speaker Exchange Program.  In the spring 2013, Lola Brown, PhD candidate in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program and Nicole Barkley, PhD candidate in the Biological Sciences Program gave talks at Brown University and UNC Chapel Hill respectively.  Both Fellows will defend their work and begin postdoctoral positions at Yale University (Lola Brown) and North Carolina Central (Nicole Barkley) this fall.  Finally, we plan to invite other IMSD graduate programs to participate in the Speaker Exchange Program.  Cedric Uytingco, a PhD candidate in the Graduate Programs in Life Science (GPILS) Neuroscience Program has expressed an interest in visiting Rutgers University this spring.

In May 2012, the IMSD Meyerhoff Student Board, a student advisory board for the graduate IMSD program; organized with the assistance of IMSD staff a grantsmanship workshop that included an interactive workshop where participating IMSD graduates were required to bring with them to the workshop their “pre-written” Specific Aims.  During the workshop the IMSD Director, Michael Summers and the former Chair of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, Dr.  Ralph Pollack (retired) would review and provide feedback to the students.   Following the workshop, students who were planning to submit their proposals by the August deadline submitted their proposal to IMSD staff who then distributed the proposals to a pre-selected review panel that included faculty from both campuses - Dr. Michael Summers (IMSD Director), Dr. Antonia Antalis (Director, Molecular Medicine Program UMB), Dr. David Eisenmann (biology professor).  In July 2012, the student participants re-convened for the second half of the workshop which was a “Mock Study Section”.  The review panel selected one proposal to review before the students and provided constructive feedback to the group.  

Three (Atum Buo, Jodian Brown and Brittny Davis) of the four students who submitted proposals were funded and  more recently, the fourth student received a good impact score and is pending feedback from a resubmission.    The IMSD graduate students are eager to host the second grantsmanship workshop.  We plan to have this workshop in November 2013 and again in the spring 2014.