On Friday, May 12th, the department held our annual Scott Falkenthal colloquium featuring talks from current graduate students in the third and fifth year of the program. We also enjoyed a keynote address entitled "Synaptic dysfunction in spinal muscular atrophy: Clues from a novel genetic modifier" from Dr. Umrao Monani. Dr. Monani completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics with Arthur Burghes and is now the Darryl C. De Vivo Professor of Pediatric Neurology in the Columbia University Department of Neurology.

It was a fabulous day of science ranging from corn epigenetics to cancer and from mice and zebrafish models of disease to yeast tRNAs and mRNA splicing.

All of the speakers were wonderful, but we did highlight a few:

Valentina Posada (Christin Burd lab) earned second place in the third year for her presentation "The duality of melanin: opposing roles of cell-intrinsic pigment in melanoma formation"
Oliver Marchus (Jay Hollick lab) earned first place in the third year for his presentation "pl1 paramutation requires a putative dsRNA-binding protein encoded by x1"
Geremy Lerma (Sharon Amacher lab) earned first place in the fifth year for his presentation "Development of a high throughput zebrafish screen to identify genetic modifiers of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy"

Congratulations to all, and special thanks to Ruben Petreaca for spearheading the organization and to Debbie Lipp and the graduate students for keeping everything organized!