Grad News Forum

Congratulations to Chris Audu, a fifth year student in the Mierke Lab (MD-PHD), who was one of four winners of the Graduate Poster Session held recently at the Top of the Hop! In addition to winning a poster award, Chris also won the award for Community Service. Enjoy your winnings, Chris! (Read on for a summary of Audu’s poster.)

How can we reduce the number of long-term kidney rejections, due to BK viral infections that occur after kidney-transplant surgery?  The answer may lie in how the BK virus uses its coat protein, VP1, to adhere to kidney cells. We know that BK VP1 uses a cell surface glycan as its receptor when binding to mammalian cells. We also know that the receptor can interact with a groove found between the BC and HI loops on VP1.  Hence, our work has focused on developing a smaller protein construct containing the BC/HI loops from VP1 and using this as a research amenable scaffold mimicking the external binding properties of BK virus.

We have been able to show, using techniques such as flow cytometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, circular dichroism and in vitro fluorescent cell assays, that our protein construct is viable as an adequate mimic of BK VP1 binding activity. Currently, we are using this construct as a screening tool to identify and subsequently synthesize novel small molecules that can competitively inhibit BK virus from cells and hence, limit infection. We are excited about the research trajectory and are hopeful of finding a possible effective drug hit against this debilitating virus especially given that there is currently no adequate therapeutic.

Summary by Chris Audu

Daniel Avesar presents his poster

The Dartmouth Neuroscience Center organized its 26^th annual Neuroscience Day on March 16^th, 2012. Faculty, postdocs, and students from Dartmouth and the region all participated to make this day a success!

The keynote speakers this year were Dr. John Trojanowski (MD/PhD) and Dr. Virginia Lee (PhD/MBA), both from the University of Pennsylvania—they each gave brilliant talks describing neurodegenerative diseases and the molecular mechanisms behind such pathologies.

There were more than 70 posters submitted for the poster session! Congrats to Pamela Rosato and Sarah Katzenell from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Dartmouth for winning the best poster award for their poster describing latency of herpes simplex virus infections.

Their findings so far show that innate immunity, and autophagy, a process in which cells digest some of their compartments, might be involved in this process. Additionally, Daniel Avesar, a graduate student in the physiology and neurobiology department here at Dartmouth gave a great presentation describing how a special type of neurons in the brain called commensurate neurons (COM) may contribute to the positive symptoms of psychosis during hallucinations.

The day did not end at Dartmouth but continued at the Norwich Inn where students had the opportunity to dine with Dr. Lee and Dr. Trojanowski who had much advice for them, including these simple but important words of wisdom: Never give up, keep on working hard and smart, and you can achieve your goals. Well done, Dartmouth! We look forward to next year’s conference for another day of sharing fascinating findings and discussing science!

by Gilbert Rahme

Graduate Appreciation Week, which kicks off this Monday, April 9th, will feature activities to both raise awareness of and celebrate the contributions that graduate students provide to the Dartmouth community.

Dartmouth graduate students serve a variety of roles on campus, from teaching assistants to research collaborators, and contribute to the high level of academic research being done at Dartmouth.  There are over 700 graduate students in 20 masters and doctoral programs in the arts and sciences at Dartmouth, and account for nearly a fifth of the total student population of the College.

Graduate student research will be highlighted at the Graduate Poster Session on Tuesday, April 10^th, at the Top of the Hop.  Designed as a way for students to present their research to the larger Dartmouth community, the session will feature over 45 graduate presenters from a variety of academic disciplines.  Judges include faculty members, graduate alumni, and industry professionals, and prizes will be awarded to the top four presenters.

“This is a great week to celebrate graduate students and the many contributions that they make to the Dartmouth community,” says Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean of Graduate Student Affairs. “The graduate students really seem to enjoy all the activities the Graduate Studies Office and the Graduate Student Council offer to show our appreciation of them.”

Provost Carol Folt will provide the opening remarks at the poster session, and the recipients of the 2012 Graduate Community Award and the Faculty Mentoring Award will also be announced.  For many graduate students, the poster session represents the culmination of their academic life at Dartmouth, and provides an opportunity to explain their research to diverse audiences and to engage with those outside of their immediate field.

“The poster session is wonderful, from both an academic and social stand point,” says Regina Salvat, a second-year PhD student at the Thayer School of Engineering and one of this year’s poster presenters.  “As an engineer, it’s great to meet students from other disciplines, learn about their work, and look for applicable connections to my own research.”

In addition to the poster session, there are also multiple social activities for graduate students this week.  The Graduate Studies Office will be hosting an Adviser/Advisee breakfast in Occom Commons on Thursday, April 12^th, from 8-9:30 am.  An annual event, the breakfast provides an opportunity for graduate professors and advisors to interact with and acknowledge the work of their graduate students in an informal setting.

As the main student-run governing body of the arts and sciences graduate population, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) also takes an active role in Graduate Appreciation Week.  Throughout the week, various GSC-recognized student organizations will sponsor activities such as an Indian Cooking class, a hike around Oak and Balch Hill, and a “Graduate Pub Night” following Tuesday’s poster session. On Wednesday, April 11^th, the GSC will hold a Wine and Cheese Tasting at Tom Dent Cabin on the Connecticut River.  Featuring wine and cheese pairings from around the globe, the event is open to all graduate students and their guests.  In addition to helping plan and implement programming, the GSC also provides every graduate student with a small gift during Grad Appreciation Week.  This year, each graduate student will receive a customized Graduate Studies temporary tattoo, which will be distributed by GSC departmental representatives to their constituents.

Read the full schedule of events for Graduate Appreciation Week here—and don’t forget to wear those temporary tattoos this week with pride!

by Erin E. O’Flaherty

Graduate Appreciation Week
April 9-15, 2012

In recognition of graduate students and their valuable contributions to the Dartmouth community.

GSC Indian Cooking Class
Monday, April 9, 7-9 pm
Fahey Commons
Do you love Indian food, but have no idea how to cook it at home? Learn how to make a full-course Indian meal—from appetizer to dessert—from GSC Vice President and Indian native Aarathi Prasad.  Contact Erin O’Flaherty (GSAC) or Aarathi Prasad with any questions.

Registration is now closed for this event.

Graduate Poster Session
Tuesday, April 10, 5-7:30 pm
Top of the Hop
This annual forum allows graduate students to display and present their scholarly works to the Dartmouth community. Prizes will be awarded to the top three presenters!

Grad Pub Night
Tuesday, April 10 after the Poster Session
Pub location: TBA
Relax and unwind with fellow grad students after the Poster Session.

Wine Tasting
Wednesday, April 11, 6:30-9 pm
Tom Dent Cabin (down by the CT River)
Join us for a Wine and Cheese tasting at the Tom Dent Cabin to celebrate Grad Appreciation Week.  Questions? Contact Regina Salvat (North Park GA) or Erin O’Flaherty (GSAC).

Adviser/Advisee Coffee, Tea, and Muffin Time
Thursday, April 12, 8-9:30 am
Occom Commons
Take time out of your busy day to drink a cup of coffee or tea, and enjoy an assortment of goodies from Lou’s. This is a great opportunity to informally chat with your adviser! Make sure to invite your adviser well in advance of the event. Or if you don’t have an advisor yet, invite a faculty member whom you might like to work with. Co-sponsored by the International Mentoring Graduate Program (IMPG).

Diverse-IT: Examining the Sex of Information Technology
Thursday April 12 at 4:30 pm
Haldeman 041
Join us for an exciting panel exploring the role of gender in the development and use of information technologies, and the implications for ensuring vibrancy in the fields of computer science and engineering. Sponsored by The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS) in collaboration with the Women and Gender Studies Program, the Women in Science Program (WISP), the Computer Science Department, and the Thayer School of Engineering.

According to the 2010 report “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” by the American Association of University Women, girls and boys take math and science courses in roughly equal numbers in elementary, middle and high school, and “about as many girls as boys leave high school prepared to pursue science and engineering majors in college.” However, though more women than men now enroll in college, “by graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field, and in some, such as physics, engineering, and computer science, the difference is dramatic, with women earning only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees.”

Though such statistics are distressing, this panel seeks to confront the low numbers of women in information technology fields in two ways, first by examining the “sex of information technology” and specific ways to address problems in training, and second by celebrating successful women in IT and learning from their personal experiences.

Lunch with Panelists
Thursday, April 12, 12-1:30 pm
212 Collis
Graduate and undergraduate students are invited to have lunch with the panelists.
To RSVP for the lunch: Blitz WISP by Tuesday, April 10

Grad Student Teaching Assistant Appreciation Lunch
Friday, April 13, 12-1:30 pm
DCAL, 102 Baker Library
Graduate students who have been nominated by undergraduates for their teaching, either in a classroom or research setting, will be invited to lunch at DCAL.

Hike with the Graduate Outing Club (GOC)
Saturday, April 14 @10 am-1 pm
Oak Hill/Balch Hill
Take a hike with the GOC around Oak Hill and Balch Hill.
Sign-up by emailing goc@dartmouth.edu.

**Subscribe to “The Graduate Forum” during Graduate Appreciation Week (April 9-14) and receive a $5 gift certificate to the Dirt Cowboy**

*Photo from last year’s Graduate Poster Session

Dan Osipovitch and Brian Pogue

Congratulations to Dan Osipovitch, graduate student in the PEMM program, who was one of four winners of the Graduate Poster Session held recently at the Top of the Hop! Enjoy your winnings, Dan! (Read on for a summary of Osipovitch’s poster.)

“Towards Better Protein Therapeutics: Reducing Immunogenicity”

Throughout history we have used small molecules to treat disease: pop an aspirin, take your antibiotic, gulp some NyQuil. But in more recent years, people have discovered the utility of enzymes as therapeutics. Unlike most small molecules, enzymes have the capability of chemically modifying a system—breaking bonds or putting bonds back together. Enzymes can detoxify poisons, eat the cell walls of bacteria and cause them to die, and specifically target cancer cells, to name a few functions. But if enzymes are so great, why hasn’t there been a complete revolution towards protein-based therapeutics?

Well, thousands of years of evolution are to blame. The immune system protects us from disease and foreign proteins. When a protein is injected into the blood stream, there is a cascade of events that lead to the recognition and removal of the protein. This causes therapeutic proteins/enzymes to be quickly degraded, killing any therapeutic potential they once had.

So what can we do to try to trick the immune system? We, the protein engineers, teamed up with computer scientists to try to tackle this problem; we hypothesize that if we can keep the immune system from seeing the therapeutic protein, no immunogenicity (immune response) will develop.

The computer scientists study our candidate enzyme and use various algorithms and databases to decide what regions on the protein (epitopes) will elicit an immune response. To do this, the algorithms decide how well epitopes interact with MHC II proteins—these are the proteins in antigen-presenting immune cells that display epitopes to the immune system.

If we can disrupt the interaction between the epitopes and the MHC IIs, then there is a much smaller chance for the immune system to see the proteins. Their algorithms then predict, using multiple sequence alignments, what mutations can be made to disrupt these interactions.

In the lab, we want to make sure that these mutations don’t harm the therapeutic potential of the enzyme. I use techniques of recombinant DNA/protein to develop and purify the mutant proteins. I can then do kinetic and thermodynamic studies to see how the mutations may have affected the therapeutic potential of the enzymes.

We then work with DartLab to test how these new enzymes stimulate the immune system. We are currently working on a protein called beta-lactamase that has potential anti-cancer uses and we have constructed and characterized a handful of mutants to test kinetics and thermodynamics. The immune studies are ongoing. In the future, we hope to move to high-throughput strategies to find the best possible mutants.

Our hope is to validate the algorithms and then be able to use them on a wide range of protein therapeutics. This work will hopefully help the huge and growing field of protein/enzyme based therapeutics. But, we must remain humble and realize we’re trying to trick that which has protected us for thousands of years—the immune system.

poster summary by Dan Osipovitch
photo by Erin O’Flaherty

Simone Whitecloud receives her award.

Congratulations to Simone Whitecloud, PhD candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, who was one of four winners of the Graduate Poster Session held recently at the Top of the Hop! Enjoy your winnings, Simone! (Read on for a summary of Whitecloud’s poster.)

“Arctic Migrations, Plants, and People”

Although there are many peoples in the Arctic, the plants and animals of the region are the same across these cultures and languages. We are documenting how plant knowledge changes across the region.

My collaborator, a linguist, investigates how names differ across languages and I study how medicinal and culinary uses of plants change across the region. We use a combination of archived resources and interviews to gather information.

Our findings indicate that there may be contradictory uses of plants across the region. For example, West Greenlanders make a strong drink of Labrador tea (Ledum palustre) while speakers of Inuktitut in Canada feel a tea of this plant alone is too strong and other herbs must be included. However, both cultures agree that this plant is useful to fight off infection. We will visit southern Greenland this summer to continue this ongoing work.

poster summary by Simone Whitecloud
photo by Erin O’Flaherty

James Hughes stands in front of his winning poster.

Congratulations to computer science graduate student James Hughes who was one of four winners of the Graduate Poster Session held recently at the Top of the Hop! Enjoy your winnings, James! (Read on for a summary of Hughes’s poster.)

“Nonparametric Sparsification of Complex Multiscale Networks”

Scientists deal with massive amounts of data. Analyzing data often involves comparing two objects of study by quantifying some relationship between them (e.g., friendships in social networks or correlations between stock prices over time). Many of these interactions are not significant and can be detrimental to subsequent scientific analysis. We propose a method to remove the insignificant interactions in the data by applying ideas from the analysis of networks, in which we consider local interactions and retain only those that are highly probable given the data.

poster summary by James Hughes
photo by Erin O’Flaherty

Poster judge and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Miles Blencowe hands Cori her award.

Congratulations to biology PhD candidate Cori D’Ausilio who was one of four winners of the Graduate Poster Session held recently at the Top of the Hop! Enjoy your winnings, Cori! (Read on for a summary of D’Ausilio’s poster.)

“The Role of Nuclear Position and Ploidy in Asynchronous Nuclear Divisions in Multinucleate Cells.”

We use the multinucleate fungus Ashbya gossypii to understand how nuclei are able to behave independently when they reside in the same cytoplasm. In these cells, the nuclei divide at different rates despite access to the same proteins and cues from the cytoplasm. My research shows that there is an underlying pattern in nuclear division, in which nuclei that arise from the same mitotic event have similar timing. This relationship is maintained even when the related nuclei travel far from one another in the cell after they are born.

We have also discovered that not all of the nuclei within these cells have the same number of chromosomes, indicating that the deleterious effects of improper chromosome numbers are buffered within the context of a syncytium. Using this model system, we are beginning to understand how division is coordinated within a common cellular environment and are exploring mechanisms that generate these observed patterns.

poster summary by Cori D’Ausilio
photo by Erin O’Flaherty

Grad student Elizabeth Macari, Poster Winner

Dartmouth graduate student Fabrizio Galimberti, from the Program of Pharmacology and Toxicology, kicked off the 4^th Annual Integrative Biology Symposium on campus with his talk on “Tumor Suppressive and Oncogenic MicroRNAs in Lung Cancer.”

The symposium brings together many biological research groups on campus to present work and discuss ideas. Most participants agree that organizational conferences that attract different perspectives on the same issues are the key to making new discoveries.

The theme for this year’s conference was “RNA and Disease: Beyond the Central Dogma”. Invited speakers and Dartmouth professors talked about microRNA, messenger RNA, patterns of observation, and phenotype observations.

In keeping with the theme of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, poster presenters were students from a variety of programs at The Dartmouth Institute, the Thayer School of Engineering, and other colleges across campus. The event was sponsored by several major grants and laboratories on campus, including the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), and the new Institute for Quantitative Biological Sciences (iQBS), which offers a new PhD degree program at Dartmouth.

Students benefited not just from the science, but also from numerous door prizes. Poster winners, Luca Magnani, Sergey Fogelson, and Elizabeth Macari took home iPad’s!

by Brian Pogue
photo by Tennile Sunday

Nicholas B. Tito, Chemistry (Jane E. G. Lipson), was one of the four poster winners.

Nicholas’ Poster Session Summary:

The prospect of designing the physical properties of polymeric materials is powerful. Polymers are composed of chain-like “macromolecules,” comprised of a linked sequence of chemical subunits called monomers. Properties of the material are governed by the choice and arrangement of these monomers. One property relevant to practical applications is the “glass transition”–the temperature at which the sample transforms from a melt to an amorphous solid. My research involves creating theoretical models to yield strategies that use control of macromolecular chemical architecture to tailor the glass transition of bulk polymers, as well as polymer thin films.

by Nicholas B. Tito