Biology graduate students win top presentation awards

Three graduate students from Miami University won best presentation awards at the Midwest Society for Developmental Biology annual meeting held Oct. 18-20 at the University of Michigan.

Best Student Talk:

Courtney Clark-Hachtel (Miami '12), a fourth-year doctoral student working with Yoshi Tomoyasu, associate professor of biology, received the Best Student Talk Award for her presentation:  "Exploring the origin of insect wings through functional analysis of vestigial in various arthropod species."
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She will receive up to $1,000 to attend the Society for Development Biology national meeting this summer. Only one student and one postdoctoral researcher were selected for this award.

Clark-Hachtel has been mentored by Tomoyasu since her first year as an undergraduate at Miami. Last year she was awarded a fellowship from the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program for her research project on determining the evolutionary origin of the insect wing. 

Best Poster Awards

Yi-Ting Lai, a second-year master's degree student working with Tomoyasu, was one of 14 recipients of a Best Poster Award for her poster presentation "Identification of a pan-holometabolous insect wing enhancer responsible for nubbin wing expression."

Phuong Lam, a first-year doctoral student working with Mike Robinson, professor of biology, won a Best Poster Award for her presentation “Evaluation of two similar Cre transgenic lines (Le-Cre and P0-3.9-GFPCre) for tissue-specific gene deletion studies."