UNM Students Win Poster Presentation Awards at SACNAS Annual Meeting

Five stu­dents from UNM’s Ini­tia­tive for Max­i­miz­ing Stu­dent Devel­op­ment (IMSD) and two from UNM’s Minor­ity Access to Research Careers (MARC) pro­gram won 2012 SACNAS Under­grad­u­ate Stu­dent Poster Pre­sen­ta­tion Awards at the organization’s SACNAS (Soci­ety for the Advance­ment of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Amer­i­cans in the Sci­ences) national meet­ing held recently in Seat­tle, Wash. More than 2000 stu­dents attended the meet­ing, most of whom pre­sented posters and oral presentations.

The UNM stu­dents won the awards in the cat­e­gory of Bio­log­i­cal, Agri­cul­tural & Envi­ron­men­tal Life Sci­ences. The IMSD stu­dents include: Wylie Bar­ton, Genet­ics; Megan Hudgell, Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences; Alice Mar­tinic, Cell/Molecular Biol­ogy; Matthew Med­ina, Micro­bi­ol­ogy; and Daniel Moezzi, Biol­ogy. The MARC stu­dents include Rachel Gomez, Biochemistry/Biophysics and Daniel Lujan, Biology.

SACNAS is a 40-year old national orga­ni­za­tion that was started by His­panic and Native sci­en­tists — many of whom were from New Mex­ico. The soci­ety of sci­en­tists is ded­i­cated to fos­ter­ing the suc­cess of Hispanic/Chicano and Native Amer­i­can scientists—from col­lege stu­dents to professionals—to attain advanced degrees, careers and posi­tions of lead­er­ship in science.

SACNAS Stu­dent Research Pre­sen­ta­tion Awards are pre­sented annu­ally dur­ing the SACNAS National Con­fer­ence. Hon­orees receive a mon­e­tary award; those awards spon­sored by SACNAS sci­en­tific soci­ety part­ners also gen­er­ally include all-expense paid par­tic­i­pa­tion in that society’s next annual meeting.

Under­grad­u­ate stu­dent poster pre­sen­ters and grad­u­ate stu­dent oral pre­sen­ters are rec­og­nized for their out­stand­ing research pre­sen­ta­tions. Recog­ni­tions are deter­mined based on scores pro­vided by mentor-judges and the col­lec­tive rec­om­men­da­tions of all judges within each subdiscipline.

The IMSD and the MARC pro­grams, in the UNM Depart­ment of Biol­ogy, are geared toward improv­ing research train­ing and oppor­tu­ni­ties for under­rep­re­sented minor­ity students.

UNM’s IMSD pro­gram offers research train­ing and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment to pre­pare stu­dents for grad­u­ate school. IMSD is funded by a grant from the National Insti­tute of Gen­eral Med­ical Sci­ence (NIGMS) of the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH). The over­all goal of IMSD is to pro­mote diver­sity, which includes increas­ing the num­ber of under­rep­re­sented minori­ties who pur­sue Ph.D.-level research careers in the bio­med­ical sciences.

The MARC pro­gram at UNM sup­ports tal­ented under­grad­u­ates with research train­ing and sup­port that directly pre­pares schol­ars for careers in bio­med­ical research. The fields of research could be biol­ogy, chem­istry, cell and mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy, genet­ics, bio­physics, math­e­mat­ics, phar­ma­col­ogy, bio­chem­istry, bio­engi­neer­ing or com­puter sci­ence. The pro­gram goals are to increase the num­ber and com­pet­i­tive­ness of under­rep­re­sented minori­ties engaged in bio­med­ical research by increas­ing the research train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for scholars.

For more infor­ma­tion, visit: SACNAS.

Media con­tact: Steve Carr (505) 277‑1821; email: scarr@unm.edu