The 45th Annual Postdoc-Faculty Day met virtually for two half-day sessions of scientific talks from Lineberger’s top postdoctoral trainees.
This year, it welcomed Dr. Steven Gray, Associate Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dr. John O’Bryan, Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina as keynote speakers who spoke about their career path and current research, since the completion of their training at UNC. The event also featured 9 oral and 35 poster presentations from postdoctoral and graduate student trainees on research topics ranging from optogenetic control of vinculin-actin to efforts to contractile ring component density dynamics.
Prizes were given for the top two talks, top three postdoctoral posters, and top poster from a graduate student. The winners were:
Best talks:
Hui-Chia Yu-Kemp, PhD, “Nonmuscle Myosin II Drives Actomyosin Bundling at Nascent Adherens Junctions” and Emily Harrison, PhD, “A circle RNA regulatory axis promotes lung squamous metastasis via CDR1-mediated regulation of Golgi trafficking”
Best postdoctoral posters:
1st Jordan Koehn, PhD, “Transcriptome-wide discovery of RNA-ligand interactions by Frag-JuMP”
2nd Aleksandra Skrajna, PhD, “Deciphering the nucleosome interactome”
3rd Jackson Trotman, PhD, “Elements at the 5′ end of Xist harbor SPEN-independent transcriptional antiterminator activity”
Best graduate poster:
Nate Diehl, “Life without KRAS: profiling the KRAS-dependent kinome to identify novel therapeutic vulnerabilities in pancreatic cancer”