Chapin, Bowen win in Bioscience Day poster session

Two ISR Ph.D. students won their categories in the poster session at the University of Maryland’s Bioscience Day on Nov. 12.

Ashley Chapin (BIOE) won in in the Bioengineering category for “Dynamic in vitro biosensing with flexible microporous multimodal cell-interfacial sensors.” The poster presented an in vitro platform that can support growth of a model gut epithelium on a membrane-integrated cyclic voltammetry sensor with a carbon nanotube-modified working electrode for selective sensing of the neurotransmitter serotonin. It demonstrates the capability of a membrane-integrated sensor to detect 5-HT released from enterochromaffin cells in future iterations of the system. Additional authors on the poster are Pradeep Rajasekaran, Jens Herberholz, William Bentley and Reza Ghodssi. Chapin is advised by Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR).

Zachary Bowen (Biology) won the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science category for “Single cell and population encoding in input and associative layers of mouse auditory cortex among strains.” The poster depicted research to characterize populations of neurons that were active both during tonal stimuli and in the absence of any stimulus. The encoding of sound information is thought to be transformed between layers, but the nature of this transformation is unclear. Since stimulus information is represented in populations of neurons, the research investigated the spatiotemporal organization of neuronal population activity across layers. Additional authors are Daniel Winkowski, Dietmar Plenz and Patrick Kanold. Bowen is advised by ISR-affiliated Professor Patrick Kanold (Biology).

Bioscience Day is an annual event sponsored by the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences for executives and professionals in industry and government. It includes research talks, an inventor pitch competition, a research poster competition, networking panels, and a keynote lecture. Bioscience Day features the most recent advances in the biological sciences and biotechnology at the University of Maryland and gives attendees the opportunity to meet university scientists and interact and recruit graduate and undergraduate student researchers.

The 2019 poster winners
Xingchen Liu in Agriculture, Food, and Nutritional Sciences
Madolyn Britt in Biochemistry/Biophysics
Anshuman Swain in Biodiversity, Conservation, Ecology, Evolution & Behavior
Ashley Chapin in Bioengineering
Allison Keyes & Darrah Speis in Education/Curricular Innovation
Grace Tietz in Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics, and Proteomics
Dina Eloseily & Julia Jager in Microbiology and Immunology
Sohini Dutt in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (graduate)
Alexandra Schneider & Alexandra Olson in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (undergraduate)
Zac Bowen in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science

Published November 21, 2019