UC GradSlam winners showcase research from drug delivery to HIV detection
Summary
At the Regents meeting the Board heard four three-minute presentations from winners of the systemwide GradSlam competition highlighting peer-voted and judged research in chemistry, mathematics, pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences.
The Regents heard the winners of this year's systemwide GradSlam competition during the July 17 meeting, where four graduate students presented three-minute summaries of their research and received questions from Regents.
Presenters included Kunle Adewole (PhD student in chemistry and biochemistry, UC Merced; People's Choice winner) who described designing peptide-based "drug cages" to improve targeted drug delivery; Angelis Vargas Casillas (PhD candidate, mathematics, UC Riverside; third place) who presented an agent-based mathematical model for keloid scar growth to help test potential treatments virtually; Yara Katib (PhD, pharmacology and toxicology, UC Davis; second place) who described automated imaging and software to screen psychedelic-like compounds that regrow neural connections; and Sofia Miliotis (PhD candidate, pharmacogenomics, UCSF; first place) who described EpiScan, a high-throughput method to identify viral peptides presented on infected cells with possible applications to HIV therapies.
Regents and board members praised the presentations and asked questions about translational pathways and federal funding impacts; UC leaders noted that federal research cuts threaten long-term pipelines and pledged advocacy. The GradSlam segment was described by multiple Regents as an uplifting demonstration of the university's research and communication training for graduate students.
