GW President Steven Knapp and Vice President for Research Leo Chalupa listen to a poster presentation during Research Days. (Photo by Jessica McConnell Burt)

Research Days Highlight Students’ Scholarship

Record number of students participated in 18th annual event.

In more than 450 poster presentations over two days earlier this month, George Washington University undergraduate and graduate students presented research spanning the arts and sciences during GW’s 18th annual Research Days event.

“It was exhilarating to hear our students speaking so knowledgably about their research activities and findings,” said GW’s Vice President for Research Leo Chalupa. “I was astonished to find that a few posters were by freshmen! It is really gratifying to get a firsthand account of how the research efforts of our faculty are positively impacting the education of our students, both graduate and undergraduate.”

Among students in the Research Days winners’ circle were a handful working under researchers who are slated to fill the Science and Engineering Hall:

  • In the engineering category: first-prize winner Jiaoyan (Jenny) Li, who worked with James Lee from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and second-prize winner Damon Conover, who worked with Murray Loew, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • In the natural sciences category: first-prize winner Julian Sacca-Schaeffer, who worked with biology professor Damien O’Halloran, and second-prize winner Jaishri Atri, who worked with molecular biology professor Ioannise Eleftherianos.

The complete list of award winners is available on the Research Days website.

The event, he said, notched a 25 percent increase in the number of non-medical poster presentations over last year.

Topics for the first day ranged from the natural sciences to the humanities.

Senior Patricia Michelson, a psychology major, presented her research on the role of personal choice in encouraging young men to use sun protection. She found that when information was presented as a personal choice rather than as recommendations to follow, men were more likely to indicate a willingness to protect themselves from the sun. The research has implications for how public health campaigns aimed at preventing skin cancer are designed, she said.

Jaishri Atri, a student in the biological sciences five-year combined BS/MS program, conducted research on endosymbiotic bacteria, a type of bacteria that reside within other organisms. In her research, Ms. Atri, who worked with junior biology student Julia Accetta, studied two types of fruit flies and two types of endosymbiotic bacteria. They found that flies infected with two kinds of bacteria lived longer than flies infected with either one type of bacteria or none at all. The bacteria provided a measure of protection from infection in the host organism.

The research could have implications for understanding human immunity, Ms. Atri said, since fruit flies’ immune systems are surprisingly similar to humans’.

“When something works in nature, it often works for everyone and everything,” she said. “After all, humans share something like 60 percent of our DNA with bananas.”

Senior Joel Uyenco conducted a qualitative study about racial minorities’ service-learning experiences at predominantly white universities. He found that while minority students sometimes benefited from being able to more easily connect with populations being served, the students also found that they were often singled out as “spokespersons” for their racial or ethnic group during classroom portions of service-learning activities. His findings indicate the need for greater exploration of minority students’ experiences when designing service-learning curriculum, he said.

The second day of the event focused on health and medicine, highlighting the partnership between GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research, the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), the School of Nursing, the School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) and Children’s National Medical Center.

Students and residents presented more than 300 posters, the scope of which ranged from basic science research to translational efforts seeking to convert discoveries into patient-focused applications, to human-subject investigations exploring the effectiveness of new therapies and practices.

“The students are as excited about presenting their research as we are about seeing their outcomes and hearing about the data,” said Vincent Chiappinelli, interim associate vice president for health affairs and associate dean at SMHS.

“Some of the presentations we saw today were four years’ worth of research work,” he said.

The day’s speakers focused on the theme of HIV/AIDS, chosen “because our faculty has been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS research for decades,” said Jeffrey Akman, MD ’81, vice president for health affairs and dean of SMHS. “Today our students really got a sense of the national prominence that GW has in the work [on] HIV/AIDS.”

One measure of that was the keynote speakers. First was Gary Simon, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and vice chair of the Department of Medicine, who played a seminal role in the history of HIV/AIDS at GW, as well as in Washington, D.C. On Aug. 29, 1981, he diagnosed a young Haitian girl with HIV/AIDS, the first recognized case in the city.

The second keynote speaker was Alan Greenberg, MD ’82, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at SPHHS, and director of the National Institutes of Health-funded District of Columbia Developmental Center for AIDS Research (D.C. D-CFAR).

Dr. Greenberg discussed the historical barriers to HIV/AIDS care and prevention in the city, and how GW’s collaborations with the D.C. government and community institutions have helped pave the way forward. Those efforts include a landmark boost in local HIV/AIDS surveillance and current work to transform the District into a center for research on the epidemic.

—Laura Otto and Laura Donnelly-Smith
Read the full story at GW Today.

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