Research Showcase 2024: Poster winners

Thank you to everyone who attended the UF Health Cancer Center's Research Showcase 2024 on Jan. 31 at the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom. We had a record 181 posters across our four research programs, four from our cancer research training and education programs, and 14 posters from our Shared Resources and Cores.

We would like to congratulate our poster winners and Predoctoral Awardees, listed below, and give a special thank you to our judges and everyone who helped make the event an outstanding success. 

Pre-Collegiate, Undergraduate & Postbaccalaureate Student

IOM 104: Huijia Liu
Mentor: Christian Jobin, Ph.D.
"Microbial-derived immunostimulatory small molecule synergizes with anti-PD-1 therapy in lung cancer"

IOM 110 John Sommerville
Mentor: Coy Heldermon, M.D., Ph.D.
"Differences in composition, diversity, and function of the fecal microbiota of post-menopausal breast cancer patients compared to healthy, age-matched controls"

CTT 92 Juliette Zapata
Mentor: Meghan Ferrall-Fairbanks, Ph.D.
"The race against time: quantifying the temporal dynamics of cisplatin resistance in ovarian cancer"

Graduate & Predoctoral Student

CTT 45: Seth Hale
Mentor: Daiqing Liao, Ph.D.
"Potent HDAC isozyme-selective PROTAC degraders as probes for understanding the biological functions of class I HDACs"

IOM 103: Suzanne Lightsey
Mentor: Blanka Sharma, Ph.D.
"Engineering hydrogels to investigate the role of extracellular matrix cues on natural killer cell functions"

CCPS 173: Daniel Stribling & Frederick Ashby
Mentor: Ilyas Sahin, M.D.
"Evaluation of ChatGPT (GPT-4) and Google Bard performance on medical questions by UF Health oncology patients"

IOM 111: Gregory Takacs
Mentor: Jeffrey Harrison, Ph.D.
"Glioma-derived factors induce an immune suppressive phenotype in bone marrow-derived CCR2+ myeloid cells"

CCPS 171: Nanyangwe Siuluta
Mentor: Robert Cook, M.D., M.P.H.
"The association of traumatic life experiences with cervical cancer screening among women living with HIV in Florida"

MOO 13: Xzaviar Solone
Mentor: Lizi Wu, Ph.D.
"Investigating Aberrant AREG-EGFR Signaling in LKB1-Inactivated Lung Cancer"

Postdoctoral Trainee, Resident & Clinical Fellow

CTT 84: Amin Sobh, Ph.D.
Mentor: Jonathan D. Licht, M.D.
"NSD2 overexpression drives multiple myeloma dependence on adenylate kinase 2 by diverting one-carbon metabolism to the epigenome"

CCPS 147: Tianshi Liu, M.D.
Mentor: Yonghui Wu, Ph.D.
"Clinical large language models to predict loss to follow up for oncology patients discharged to skilled nursing facilities"

MOO 16: Xin Zhou, Ph.D.
Mentor: Lizi Wu, Ph.D.
"Novel mechanisms of immunosuppressive microenvironments in LKB1-deficient lung cancers"

Congratulations, predoctoral awardees!

Madison Carelock
Mentor: Weizhou Zhang, Ph.D.

Anna DeVries
Mentor: Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D.

Zachary Greenberg
Mentor: Mei He, Ph.D.

Nicholas Hiers
Mentor: Mingyi Xie, Ph.D.