Annual Symposium Highlights, Awards CVM Student Research
Approximately 40 of Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences’ (CVM) promising graduate and postdoctoral students shared with a community of researchers the projects they’ve been conducting during a one-day research symposium in the Veterinary & Biomedical Education Complex (VBEC).
The annual Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Research Symposium included 15 platform presentations, 23 flash talks (a three-minute synthesis of a poster presentation), and 58 poster presentations representing a plethora of research areas across all of the CVM departments.
One of those platform presentations was by third-year anatomic pathology resident Randi Gold, who shared a necropsy case that involved diagnosing a 4-month-old female English Mastiff with osteogenesis imperfecta. Also known as “brittle bone disease,” osteogenesis imperfecta is an inherited connective tissue disorder that causes defects in type-1 collagen, the predominant collagen type in bone, dentin, ligaments, tendons, and the ocular sclera.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report in a mastiff dog,” Gold told the audience as she presented slides that showed what the doctors encountered during the necropsy. “This was one of the interesting osteopath cases that we see.”
One of the conclusions drawn from the case was that osteogenesis imperfecta should be considered as a differential diagnosis for any young domestic animal species presenting with multiple fractures and without a history of trauma.
During the poster presentations that afternoon, Amer Alhaboubi, a doctoral student in the Veterinary Pathobiology (VTPB) department, discussed his project on “Genotyping of Babesia Bovis Isolates from Mexico and Puerto Rico.” Babesia Bovis is a causative agent of bovine babesiosis, a disease that is endemic in many tropical and subtropical areas.
For the project, he studied three genetic markers in cattle from Mexico and Puerto Rico, using genetic material from gene banks and the USDA.
“A primary but interesting result was that most of the samples can be clustered with samples from Portugal, while the other markers have been distributed all over the place, which is hard to explain,” Alhaboubi said. “We are in the process of getting more samples to get a better picture and we are planning to use different analyses to check the distribution.”
The collecting of this sort of primary data, he said, has major implications for the cattle industry. Alhaboubi said half of the samples clustered from Portugal, though they weren’t able to collect a lot of data from Portugal.
“If you find a similarity between a sample from Puerto Rico, which is a sample that is very similar to China, there is an explanation for that,” he said. “They import (cattle) from all over the world.”
Krisa Camargo, another poster presenter who is working toward her doctorate in toxicology, housed within the Veterinary Integrative Biosciences (VIBS) department, shared her work collecting preliminary samples from the Manchester (a community is southeastern Houston) area following Hurricane Harvey.
“I was trying to do more of a broad scope, in that we went down, sampled, tried to characterize what we found, and then the last working part is figuring out if we can create a sampling map because Houston’s prone to flooding; it has a trajectory for a lot of different hurricane-type events,” Camargo said. “Now we’re trying to figure out if we have a new baseline (of chemicals to compare against in future samplings), and if so, can we expand and grow with it, in case another event happens, because hurricane season is coming again.
Her work is part of the Texas A&M Superfund Research Center’s efforts to evaluate the complexities of hazardous chemical exposures, potential adverse health impacts, and potential hazards of exposures to complex mixtures in the Houston Ship Channel and Galveston Bay areas.
“The goal is to characterize exposure pathways, what the contaminants are of interest and if they are present, how did they move, how much did they move, and then from there is can we simulate it and predict it in the future to get a model that way,” she said.
After a panel of CVM graduate faculty members judged all of the student presentations, the event culminated with the Banquet and Awards Ceremony, held at Bryan’s The Stella Hotel in Bryan, during which students were recognized in eight categories. A keynote address by Dr. Jeffrey M. Rosen, the Charles C. Bell Professor and vice chair of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine, on “A Long Day’s Journey into Breast Cancer Research” rounded out the activities.
The winners included:
Poster Presentation
- 1st Place Graduate Student: Courtney Smith (Dr. Aline Rodrigues-Hoffmann)
- 2nd Place Graduate Student: Marcus Orzabal (Dr. Jay Ramadoss)
- 3rd Place Graduate Student: Candice Chu (Dr. Mary Nabity)
- 1st Place Postdoc: Lucas Tirloni (Dr. Albert Mulenga)
- People’s Choice: Connor Dolan (Dr. Ken Muneoka)
Platform Presentation
- 1st Place Graduate Student: Diarra Williams (Dr. Larry Suva)
- 2nd Place Graduate Student: Amanda Blake (Dr. Jan Suchodolski)
- 1st Place Postdoc: Ana Chamoun-Emanuelli (Dr. Canaan Whitfield-Cargile)
- People’s Choice: Candice Chu (Dr. Mary Nabity)
Flash Talk Presentation
- 1st Place Graduate Student: Thad Deiss (Dr. Mike Criscitiello)
- 2nd Place Graduate Student: Italo Zecca (Dr. Sarah Hamer)
- 1st Place Postdoc: Alexis Cooper (Dr. Larry Suva)
- People’s Choice: Melanie Warren (Dr. David Threadgill)
High Impact Achievement Awards
- 1st Place First Author Publication: Naomi Ohta (Dr. H. Morgan Scott)
- 2nd Place First Author Publication: Candice Chu (Dr. Mary Nabity)
- 3rd Place First Author Publication: Alyssa Meyers (Dr. Sarah Meyers)
- First Author Publications:
- Amer Alhaboubi (Dr. Maria Esteve-Gassent)
- Anitha Isaiah (Dr. Jan Suchodolski)
- Tae Kim (Dr. Albert Mulenga)
- Emile Lunde (Dr. Jay Ramadoss)
- Yu Syuan Luo (Dr. Ivan Rusyn)
- David Oldeschulte (Dr. Chris Seabury)
- Xue Yu (Dr. Guan Zhu)
- Small Grant: Justin Bejcek (Dr. Sarah Hamer)
- Large Grant: Diarra Williams (Dr. Larry Suva)
To see more photos from the Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Research Symposium, visit the CVM Flickr page.
