The 40th Annual Hayes Forum was held last month and the department did great things!

Caleb Gooden (Molecular Genetics Ph.D. candidate in the Ou lab) who won second place in the Biological Sciences at the 2026 Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum for his presentation "Genome-wide Resolution of LTR Retrotransposon Promoters and their TissueSpecific Regulatory Programs"

Lily Schumacher (Biophysics Ph.D. candidate in the Meier lab) received an Honorable Mention for her poster entitled "Specific Plant KASH Domains are Differentially Required for Individual LINC Complex Roles in Arabidopsis thaliana"

Additional departmental participants include:

• Anna Lubertozzi (Molecular Genetics Ph.D. candidate in the Plageman Lab) Oral presentation in Biological Sciences "Afadin Controls Tricellular Adherens Junction Maintenance and Lens Fiber Cell Organization"
• Davinder Singh, (Molecular Genetics Postdoctoral fellow, Wu lab) Oral presentation in Biological/Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering "The Ync13-Rga7-Rng10 Complex Selectively Coordinates Secretory Vesicle Trafficking and Secondary Septum Formation During Cytokinesis"

The Hayes Forum, organized for and by graduate students, brings together graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, staff and community members for oral and poster presentations spanning nearly every academic discipline at the university.