People, paper and presentations

Rice’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering has awarded BRC Collaborative Prizes for two research projects based at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative. The prizes showcase collaborations between Rice and Texas Medical Center researchers, and the winners will be honored May 7 at an awards ceremony at the BRC.

The $1,000 Shared Prize went to Rice graduate student Lifeng Yang and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center postdoctoral researcher Tyler Moss, whose analysis of the metabolic profiles of hundreds of ovarian tumors revealed a new test to determine whether ovarian cancer cells have the potential to metastasize. Their paper was published last year in Molecular Systems Biology. Yang is a member of Rice Assistant Professor Deepak Nagrath’s lab.

The $500 Translational Prize was awarded to Ayrat Gizzatov, first author of a paper in the journal Advanced Functional Materials about ways that submicroscopic particles of iron oxide could make magnetic resonance imaging a more powerful tool for diagnosing and fighting disease. Gizzatov is a graduate student in the Rice lab of chemist Lon Wilson. The prize goes to a Rice graduate student who has published a translational biosciences article as a first author with a medical center institutional co-author.

The Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering has awarded travel grants to 16 outstanding graduate students of the institute’s faculty members. Travel grant recipients are nominated by their faculty advisers and receive funds for costs associated with attending a scientific conference. The 2014 travel grant recipients and the scientific conferences they will be attending are:

• Andrew Erwin, mechanical engineering, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
• Eliza Fong, bioengineering, 2014 TERMIS-Americas Annual Meeting.
• Victor Garcia-Lopez, chemical and biomolecular engineering, Gordon Research Conference.
• Bagrat Grigoryan, bioengineering, Tissue Engineering and Bioprinting: Research to Commercialization.
• Songl Han, bioengineering, the Fifth International Conference on Bioengineering.
• Mohit Kumar Jolly, bioengineering, 2015 Gordon Meeting on Stem Cells and Cancer.
• Seohyoung Kim, chemical and biomolecular engineering, 2015 International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering.
• Sam Kwiatkowski, biosciences, Annual Meeting of the Association for Vision and Ophthalmology.
• Ka Wai Lin, bioengineering, International Society for Computational Biology’s Seventh Annual RECOMB/ISCB Conference.
• Jorge Mok, chemical and biomolecular engineering, American Physical Society Meeting.
• Sarita Shah, bioengineering, Controlled Release Society Annual Meeting.
• David Shis, biosciences, Winter Q-Bio Conference.
• Bo Shuang, bioengineering, European Bioimage Analysis Symposium.
• Christopher Tsao, bioengineering, Society for Biomaterials.
• Pierce Young, biosciences, Annual Meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists.
• Wenting Zhao, chemical and biomolecular engineering, American Institute of Chemical Engineering Annual Meeting.

The travel grant program is supported by the Edgar O’Rear and Mary Morse Family Funds.