Travel Fellowship Recipients

I traveled to Ventura, California to attend the Bioinorganic Research Seminar, which is a part of the Metals in Biology Gordon Conference. I was given the opportunity to present a poster and discuss my research and future career options with the leaders of my field. 

SAE WCX is one of the biggest conference in automotive and mechanical engineering. SAE WCX 2018 was held in Detroit, Michigan. I was able to meet 6 top executives from Ford and GM and got the opportunity to hear their vision on the future of autonomous vehicles. This was a very rare experience for me to talk to the people first hand, who shape the world automotive industry. I was also able to meet more than 20 researchers in my field from top universities and was able to create connection which will strengthen my research progress. My paper on "Weed detection and spray control from autonomous robot" generated a lot of interest and almost 50 people attended my presentation. All in all, it was a very successful conference for me to attend and I am grateful for the travel grant which made it possible.

I attended the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Chicago, Illinois in April 2018. Here, I got the opportunity to present my work in Dr. Tao Lu’s lab at Indiana University School of Medicine titled “Protein Arginine Methyltransferase 5 as a Tumor Promoter and Therapeutic Target in Gastrointestinal Cancers” as well as discuss future career avenues with cancer researchers from across the world. Participation in this conference provided me an opportunity to not only share my exciting findings with peers and senior scientists, but also helped in receiving critical feedback for the same. Additionally, I got a first-hand opportunity to attend talks, posters and workshops featuring cutting edge research in the cancer field. This has helped me to apply this new-found knowledge in my own research project, thus providing to a broader perspective and scope to my work. Overall, attending this conference contributed greatly to my professional development and I am thankful for the funding support through the IUPUI Travel Fellowship for this experience.

WCX 18: SAE World Congress Experience was really a professionally unique and memorable experience for me to learn the cutting-edge science and technology in the automotive field, which extends and broadens my horizon of research in the future. In addition to socializing with colleagues from both universities and industries around the world, hundreds of research papers and innovative exhibits are presented. From a research point of view, listening to academic presentations informed me what other people are doing with more detailed and clear explanations, and will also inspire my own research ideas and learn different styles of presentations. From a career point of view, meeting and connecting with other attendees provided a good communication platform for technical and potential cooperative discussions, which offered me better understanding of companies development trends and specific requirements.

With assistance from several organizations at IUPUI including the Graduate Office, I attended the International Cancer and Cognition Task Force (ICCTF) Conference in Sydney, Australia on April 9th-11th, 2018. I gave two presentations of exciting findings from research on which I am collaborating with experts across the United States. The first was an oral presentation about the interaction effect of sleep disturbance and APOE genotype on cognitive function in older breast cancer patients. The second was a poster presentation on the effects of pre-cancer treatment symptom clusters on functional outcomes one and two years later in older breast cancer patients. Both presentations included an opportunity to answer questions and discuss my findings with leading experts in the field of cancer and cognition. Discussion with these distinguished researchers provided ideas for refining my work in manuscripts which I am preparing for publication. I also attended presentations given by other researchers with specialties ranging from neuropsychology to pre-clinical animal models. Thus, I learned about cutting-edge research being done in cancer and cognition from varying disciplines. Plenaries also provided information about the most recent recommendations for research methodology in this field. Finally, I was able to network with researchers approaching the problem of cancer-related cognitive decline from similar and different perspectives.

In March, 2017 I attended the 16th International Conference on Schizophrenia Research (ICOSR) in San Diego, CA, presenting my research titled, “Metacognitive Self-Reflectivity Moderates the Relationship between Distress Tolerance and Empathy in Schizophrenia.” This work is an important extension of my dissertation work examining social cognitive deficits in those with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders; findings suggest practitioners should take into account clients’ abilities to tolerate distress as well as their metacognitive level while tailoring their treatment plans. ICOSR is a prestigious conference, drawing researchers from around the globe to come together and discuss recent developments in schizophrenia research. As a graduate student, my attendance was invaluable, as it helped me to build connections while also exposing me to new ideas and refining my own research interests.

In February 2017 I attended the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, HI. This is an event that occurs every two years and it is an important event for aquatic scientists worldwide. In this year event, around 2000 people from more than 50 different countries attended the meeting. For me, this event is special because there is not any other scientific event specific for my research field (which is remote sensing of water quality). Therefore, many researchers in this same research field attend ASLO Aquatic Sciences Meeting to share their ongoing projects. In this year event, there was a session entitled "Global Remote Sensing of Inland Waters" in which I was the only student schedule to give an oral presentation. My presentation was entitled “Improvement of Phycocyanin Estimation by Eliminating the Effect of Chlorophyll-a and Colored Dissolved Matter” and aimed to showcased a new bio-optical algorithm that we developed in our research group at the Department of Earth Sciences. This new algorithm was design to fulfill the spectral bands requirements from the next generations of satellites and sensors from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA). Sharing and getting feedback about my research as well as the amazing sessions in the scientific program made this a great experience!

The IUPUI Travel Fellowship assisted me financially to present my research at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. My oral presentation had the title "Polysulfides reactivity and their impact on sulfur biogeochemistry". In a nutshell, I study the thermodynamics and kinetics of a reaction involving elemental sulfur, sulfide and polysulfides. The importance of this reaction is related to the bioavailability of this element to microbial cells in a plethora of environments, from anoxic marine waters to geothermal systems such as Yellowstone. Furthermore, this reaction plays a drastic role in sulfur cycling during its interaction with other elements, such as carbon and iron. Even though this chemistry has been studied in the past, the pioneering aspect of my work is that I attempt to characterize the kinetics and thermodynamics of this reaction utilizing nanoparticulate elemental sulfur, a form of sulfur that is a product of microbial metabolism as well as of inorganic processes. The presentation was very successful, as well as the whole conference. I interacted with a vast variety of people, from famous academics to graduate students like myself. I am thankful to the grad school for this support and I am confident that my research will contribute to IUPUI's good reputation.

In September I attended the International Symposium on Human Identification in Minneapolis, MN. While there I presented my work during the poster session entitled Forensic DNA Phenotyping Through Massive Parallel Sequencing. Our lab, as well as my work, currently focuses on predicting what an individual looks like from DNA left at the crime scene. Current tools developed by Dr. Walsh and her collaborators can predict eye hair and skin color in two reactions, but we are currently are looking to increase the accuracy of these predictions as well as add on additional traits. That is where my work and my poster come in. Through my work with an in-house assay developed on the Illumina Miseq for Next Generation Sequencing we are able to increase the amount of genetic information we can obtain as well as add on additional markers. This also opens doors to improving our phenotyping method, allowing us to obtain a wide range of new information from our current database. All of this will be very influential in taking DNA phenotyping to the next level.

In December 2016 I attended the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, CA. There I presented a poster on a segment of my research titled "The development of blue ice moraines from englacial debris bands as detected by GPR, Mt Achernar, central Transantarctic Mountains, Antarctica." Blue ice moraines have the potential to provide important information regarding how glaciers responded to climate change over the last few glacial-interglacial cycles, but not much is understood about how these moraines develop and what the record of glacier behavior looks like. This is where my research comes into play. I am looking at trying to understand the development and evolution of these moraines using a multi-disciplinary approach and using the structural and sedimentological record they contain to better understand changes in glacier behavior over time. With the knowledge gained, we can hypothesize how the glacier may respond to current climate change.

Being selected as the ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action) Doctoral Fellow for the 45th ARNOVA Annual Conference. This was my second time to attend and present at the ARNOVA conference and I was very excited. ARNOVA is known as one of the most remarkable associations in philanthropic studies; its annual conference connects scholars, teachers, and practice leaders interested in research on nonprofit organizations, voluntary action, philanthropy and civil society, nationally and internationally. For me it was a great opportunity to share my research experience and findings with other scholars, receive intellectual advice, and be exposed to mentoring and networking opportunities. Prior to the conference, I took part in a one-day Doctoral Fellows Seminar with seven doctoral students with diverse research backgrounds, and three outstanding faculty members in the field. I was able to present my dissertation research and received valuable feedback, which helped me to explore several emergent analytic frameworks and to gain new insights that I have overlooked.

In November 2016, I attended the Society For Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, CA. I presented a poster on my research there entitled “Mechanisms underlying spinophilin dependent regulation of PP1 association with the NMDA receptor.” My research focuses on the interactions between various synaptic proteins in neuronal cells. Normal brain function is a result of proper connectivity between neurons which is achieved by proper organization of synaptic proteins. Any change in the interactions between synaptic proteins can lead to an alteration in normal brain function. My research tries to uncover the molecular and cellular basics of specific protein-protein interactions that underlie important pathways in learning and memory. These findings allow for a better understanding of the molecular basis of number of brain functions and can also pave the way to understand a number of brain disorders.

I had the opportunity to attend a conference called Time Series Analysis in Environmental Science and Climate Change Applications hosted by a European science consortium. The meeting was held in Tromsø, Norway from November 8th through the 11th. The conference consisted of a two day workshop, aimed at providing students practical experience with studying long term environmental data sets and detecting climatic trends within them. The remaining days were spent as a conference hearing from other scientists about the climate time series that they have developed. Conference attendees were also provided the opportunity to take a Northern Lights tour, a nighttime trek to find the Aurora Borealis.

The title of my research was, "A High-Resolution Paleoclimate Record from Laguna de Siscunsi, Boyaca, Colombia." In essence, Laguna de Siscunsi likely contains continuous sediment archives of Northern Hemisphere South American monsoon system variability over the last ~2-3 thousand years. Using sediment archives (specifically, lake and watershed characterization, geochronology, sedimentology and geochemistry), we hope to gain further understanding of the local paleoclimate and hydrological cycles. Siscunsi is located at high-altitude, and its waters feed into other regional lakes, including nearby Lago de Tota, which provides water resources for more than ~400,000 people. Thus, an improved record of past and present changes in this regional hydrological system will allow for a better understanding of how continued global and local climate change might affect these sensitive hydrologic systems, and the populations who depend on them.