The annual Falkenthal colloquium was held on May 25th (in person for the first time in 3 years!). The department and guests enjoyed fabulous presentations from our third and fifth year graduate students and an amazing keynote seminar from Dr. John Carpten. Dr. Carpten is currently Professor and Chair of Translational Genomics, Director of the Institute of Translational Genomics, and the Royce and Mary Trotter Chair in Cancer Research at USC Keck School of Medicine. He is an internationally recognized expert in genome science and cancer research, and works in multiple disciplines including germline genetics for disease risk and predisposition, somatic cancer genomics, health disparities research, functional genomics and precision medicine. Dr. Carpten earned his Ph.D. at OSU and as a graduate student in the Burghes lab at OSU, he participated in many Falkenthal symposia. It was great to see him back again.

While all of the graduate student presentations were great, the department singled out three for special recognition.

The best talk award in the third year went to Mowei Li (Hollick lab) for her talk entitled "Inheritance of cytosine methylation patterns associated with pl1 paramutation."

Second place in the fifth year went to Ashton Holub (Husbands lab) for his talk entitled "Differential Contributions of START Domains Between CLASS III HOMEODOMAIN LEUCINE ZIPPER Transcription Factors in Arabidopsis thaliana."

First place in the fifth year went to Monica Blatnik (Amacher lab) for her talk entitled "Pnrc2-dependent mRNA decay and translational control mechanisms promote oscillatory gene expression during vertebrate segmentation."

We would  that Monica also presented at the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program symposium on May 24th and was awarded the best presentation award in her session there as well!

Great work to all, and special thanks to Dr. Ruben Petreaca for organizing the event and to Deborah Lipp and the tireless Molecular Genetics graduate students for taking care of all the pragmatic details!