Grad Student Wins Top Poster Award at International Metabolic Engineering 11 Conference
Kelly Markham, Texas ChE graduate student and member of the Alper research group, recently won a top poster award prize in the Student/ Young Investigator Poster Award Competition at the Metabolic Engineering 11 Conference in Kobe, Japan.
Markham’s poster, “Expanding the Substrate Range and Product Portfolio of Y. lipolytica through Metabolic Pathway Engineering and Synthetic Biology Tool Development” was selected as one of 5 top poster awards at the conference and earned a $500 prize sponsored by the International Metabolic Engineering Society (IMES) and its affiliated journals, “Metabolic Engineering” and “Metabolic Engineering Communications.”
“It was an honor to be able to attend the ME11 meeting and learn about exciting new breakthroughs in the field” said Markham. “I am very grateful for support from Dr. Alper and the lab that allowed me to win this award. It would not have been possible without them.”
In addition to presenting the poster during the poster session, Markham was selected to participate in the “rapid fire” session where she had 90 seconds to present a one-slide summary of her work to the entire conference during a special afternoon session.
“Kelly’s poster highlighted the exciting work that has been going on in our group related to the rewiring of a unique yeast host for specialty chemical, commodity chemical, and biofuel applications,” Professor Hal Alper, Markham’s adviser said. “This poster allowed Kelly to showcase a number of advances she has made with this host organism and garnered a significant amount of interest from conference attendees and we are excited to publish this work shortly.”
The Metabolic Engineering Conference, sponsored by IMES, is the leading conference for sharing the state-of-the-art developments and achievements made in the field of metabolic engineering. The conference is held once every two years and covers topics in systems biology, synthetic biology, biochemical engineering, tools and methods, and emerging techniques, health care, biofuels, chemicals and materials, microbial and mammalian systems, and other disciplines and applications.
Tags: Alper Group, Cockrell School of Engineering, Hal Alper, IMES, International Metabolic Engineering Society, Japan, Kelly Markham, Kobe, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, Metabolic Engineering 11 Conference, Student/Young Investigator Poster Award Competition, Texas ChE, The University of Texas at Austin, UT Austin