Congratulations to Sarah Hernandez who is graduating December 2015. Sarah started as an IGERT fellow in July, 2012 in Professor Tanja Dominko’s lab. During her time in the IGERT program Sarah spent a summer conducting research in Prof. Wei Sun’s lab at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She has made many presentations including Gordon Conferences in Vermont and Italy, TERMIS-AM 2014 and Massachusetts Life Science Innovation Day. Sarah has also won multiple awards including the 2014 Kalenian award, Sigma Xi membership award, WPI’s i3: investing in Ideas with Impact competition.

We wish Sarah well as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Leslie Thompson, PhD. at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Thompson’s lab works on understanding the molecular pathogenesis of Huntington’s disease (HD). Sarah’s project will specifically focus on uncovering epigenetic differences between people with and without HD using ChIP-seq and RNA-seq. Then she will use bioinformatics to map those differences.

Pre-IGERT fellow Joshua Gershlak recently represented the WPI IGERT program at the annual International Conference on Biofabrication. This year’s meeting was held in Utrecht, the Netherlands where the world leaders in Biofabrication met to discuss the state-of-the-art of the field of Biofabrication as well as “out of the box” insights from related fields. The meeting was very multidisciplinary and brought together research leaders, scholars, clinicians, and company representatives from around the world.

Gershlak, a member of Professor Glenn Gaudette’s Myocardial Regeneration Lab, presented a poster at the conference. The poster was entitled “Native Decellularized Cardiac ECM Incorporated into Fibrin Microthreads to Provide In Vivo-like Microenvironment for Stem Cell Adhesion” and in which Gershlak described the incorporation of native extracellular matrix from decellularized hearts into the fibrin sutures that the Gaudette Lab is known for. The poster was met with high praise from those who attended the conference and were very excited by the work being accomplished in the Gaudette Lab.

After successful completion of VentureWell’s E-Team program Stage 1 Todd Alexander and Lindsay Lozeau have received the Stage 2 Award. With this award they could receive up to $20,000 in funding and will participate in a second workshop where the team will create their business model hypotheses and a plan to test them. Also, included are monthly coaching sessions to keep the progress going. VentureWell defines “E-Team” as a multidisciplinary group of students, faculty, and mentors working together to bring an invention to market.