Several Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology (GDCB) graduate students received travel awards in spring 2023 and fall 2022 to partially offset the cost of attending conferences in Washington, D.C.; Evanston, Ill.; Woods Hole, Mass.; St. Louis; Savannah, Ga.; Chicago; Istanbul, Turkey; Iowa City; and Ames.

Spring 2023

Sui Tong Chan Fung Fund Award recipients include Ankur Kumar, Sahiba Siddiqui and Ha Vu.

• Kumar presented “The interplay of peroxisome and mitochondrial dynamics during aging in Drosophila melanogaster” at the 64^th Drosophile Research Conference in Chicago in March. 
• Siddiqui presented “Zebrafish Fyn kinase models of microglia activation and inflammatory signaling associated neurodegeneration” in May in Ames.
• Vu delivered her talk, “Unsupervised deep peak caller for ATAC-seq” at the 27^th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology in Istanbul in April.

Dale W. Young and W.E. Loomis Fund Travel Award recipients include Panchali Chakraborty, Craig Cowling and Lander Geadelmann.

• Chakraborty presented “Investigating the dynamic regulation of plasmodesmata during bacterial infection” at the American Society of Plant Biologists’ Plant Biology 2023 in Savannah in August.
• Cowling presented “Roles of auxin transporter PILS6 in maize growth and development” at the 65^th Annual Maize Genetic Meeting in March in St. Louis.
• Geadelmann also participated in the St. Louis’ 65^th Annual Maize Genetic Meeting in March when he presented “Maize developmental transcription factors that regulate leaf initiation, morphology and phyllotaxy.”

Fall 2022 

Sui Tong Chan Fung Fund Award recipients include Abesh Bera, Angela Bunning, Jacinta Correia, Sahiba Siddiqui, Michelle Thayer and Vaishali Todi.

• Bera presented “Differential regulation of astral microtubules in a shared cytoplasm” at Cell Bio 2022 — An ASCB/EMBO Meeting in December 2022 in Washington, D.C.
• Bunning also participated in Cell Bio 2022 when she presented “A phosphoproteomic approach to understanding the role of the Bub1 kinase domain in chromosome segregation” in December 2022. 
• Correia shared her poster, “Characterization of peroxisomal import function in aged human peripheral blood mononuclear cells,” in Evanston at the 28^th Annual Midwest Stress Response and Molecular Chaperone Meeting held in January.
• Siddiqui introduced her poster, “Zebrafish Fyn kinase models of microglia activation and inflammatory signaling associated neurodegeneration,” at the Aquatic Models of human disease conference in Woods Hole in October 2022.
• Thayer presented “Interaction of Rbbp4 with B-catenin/FoxM1 pathways regulating embryonic neural progenitor proliferation” at the AAA Regional Meeting Anatomy Across Scales: From Molecules to Organisms in Iowa City in October 2022.
• Todi gave a talk and presented her poster, “Understanding chromosome segregation by drug-mediated tension responses,” at Cell Bio 2022 in December 2022.

GDCB is currently accepting applications from GDCB students for fall 2023 travel awards through Oct. 31. Students received complete application information via email.