On Friday, May 17th, 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 “Astrocyte-interneuron interaction in Huntington’s disease: what can mouse models tell us”?" from Dr. Michelle Gray. Dr. Gray completed her Ph.D. in with Christine Beattie and is now a Dixon Scholar in Neuroscience and Associate Professor in Neurology and Neurobiology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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:

Ernesto Roldan Bonet (Anita Hopper lab) earned first place in the third year for his presentation "Genome-wide application of a tRNA assay to uncover proteins involved in the tRNA retrograde pathway"
Mowei Li (Jay Hollick lab) earned first place in the fifth year for her presentation "The role of RNA-directed cytosine methylation in pl1 paramutation"
 

Congratulations to all, and special thanks to Shuai Huang and Shujun Ou for spearheading the organization, Christine Cucinotta for moderating, and to Debbie Lipp and the graduate students for keeping everything organized!