Before COVID-19’s arrival in 2020, the following five Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology students received GDCB awards in support of their fall 2019 travels: Maira Pedroso de Almeida, Mark Bouska, Ian Braun, Zakayo Kazibwe and Emmanuel Nsamba.

Sui-Tong Chan Fung Fund Travel Awards recipients are:

• Maira Pedroso de Almeida (Maura McGrail Lab)
• Mark Bouska (Hua Bai Lab)
• Emmanuel Nsamba (Mohan Gupta Lab)

Almeida presented a poster on “Short homology based CRISPR/Cas9 targeted integration for Cre/lox conditional gene inactivation tools in zebrafish” at the Genome Engineering: Frontiers of CRISPR/Cas in New York (Oct. 10-13, 2019).

Bouska gave a talk at the Midwest Drosophila Conference in Bloomington, Ind. (Nov. 2-3, 2019), on “Long non-coding RNA regulation of endo/lysosome activity and spermatogenesis via cytoskeletal elements in Drosophila.”

Nsamba presented a poster on “From Cytoskeletal Function to Genome Stability: Resolving the Mystery of Tubulin Isotypes in Budding Yeast (Saccharomyces Cerevisiae) at the American Society for Cell Biology/European Molecular Biology meeting (ASCB/EMBO) in Washington, D.C. (Dec. 7-11, 2019).

Recipients of the Dale W. Young and W.E. Loomis Award are:

• Ian Braun (Carolyn Lawrence-Dill Lab)
• Zakayo Kazibwe (Diane Bassham Lab)

Braun gave a talk at the TextXD: Text Analysis Across Domains in Berkeley, Calif. (Dec. 3-6, 2019) on “Automated methods enable direct computation on phenotypic descriptions for novel candidate gene prediction.”

Kazibwe gave both a talk and poster at the CornBelt Regional RNA Meeting in Missouri-Columbia (Oct. 18-19, 2019) on “Activation of autophagy by TOR kinase in a ribonuclease mutant."