Pediatrics Research Day

Last Wednesday, my research group had the opportunity to do a poster presentation at the 13th annual Pediatrics Research Day at the Breslin Center in East Lansing, MI. It was a great day, filled with speakers from the NIH, Rainbow Babies Children's Hospital, the University of Iowa and Children's Hospital of Detroit. We had talks on Pediatric Academics in the 21st century, Cardioprotection mechanisms for pediatric cancer treatments, and genetic approaches to restoring CFTR function. We also had 6 wonderful oral presentations by Pediatric residents, an undergraduate researcher, and a veternarian. These oral presentations were fantastic; I especially was intrigued by one resident's work with Serotonin-knock out rats that involved surgical manipulation of the ileum to apply acetic acid and observe wound healing mechanisms with the serotonin knock out v. wild type rats - fascinating! Lastly, there were 62 posters presented at the conference. It was inspiring to be around so many people interested in Pediatrics and conducting new and exciting research to better the field. 

Our project was a collaboration of six students and our research mentor, Dr. Gold. The project is relatively new, as we have only been collecting data for about 8 weeks, but we thought it was still interesting and important enough to make a poster and get our data out there. It was great to talk about our research to attendings, residents and other students and getting feedback about how our next steps should fall with the project. Ultimately, we left with a good idea of where to go and finished the day feeling optimistic about our project's design and future. 

The last portion of the day was the closing remarks and awards ceremony. They would be giving out 1 award for the best oral presentation and five awards for the top poster presentations. They started with oral presentation, awarding the top prize to a deserving resident. Moving on to the posters, they began calling the top 5 names - First was a resident, Second was a a resident, Third was a resident, Fourth was a resident, Fifth....was us! Our group poster had won an award of distinction! It was such an honor, especially with our research having very preliminary data and especially because we were the only students that were recognized with this award. What a great day!