All News @ UCSB
When the standing-room-only crowd at UC Santa Barbara’s 5th annual Grad Slam quieted, Leah Foltz began her three-minute presentation about personalized medicine.But hers wasn’t the usual academic, sometimes dry, explanation.
Foltz, a UCSB graduate student in biomolecular science and engineering, delivered an engaging summary of recent strides in stem cell research and how her lab uses this biological material to study blinding diseases. Her research explores whether scientists will one day be able to use someone’s own cells to cure their blindness.
Foltz’s lively delivery earned her a first-place finish in the campuswide competition. Now she’s headed to San Francisco to test her mettle Thursday, May 4, against participants from the nine other University of California campuses.
UC President Janet Napolitano will emcee the contest, which will be judged by a panel of leaders in industry, media, government and higher education. The event will be live-streamed at https://gradslam.universityofcalifornia.edu.
Foltz was one of 71 UCSB graduate students who participated in this year’s competition. Each of the nine preliminary rounds produced three winners, two determined by a panel of judges and the third, the “people’s choice,” as selected by the audience. Those presenters went on to the semifinals where nine finalists were chosen.
Topics for this year’s finalists ranged from chemical engineering to theater studies, the disciplines from which the two runners-up hailed. Max Nowak explained how he uses models of the blood-brain barrier to study how physical properties, such as size shape and flexibility, affect the ability of a nanoparticle drug to cross from one side to the other. Eric Jorgensen delivered a passionate speech about art as activism and the ways in which live theater chronicles history, citing the corpus of plays that have explored the AIDS crisis.
The tournament began in 2012 as an effort to better profile graduate students ...
Read More
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
The Elevator Pitch Perfected
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.