The 2nd Annual UCSC Postdoc Symposium was a success. Thank you for participating!

The postdocs, as well as graduate students and faculty, gathered at the beautiful Stevenson Event Center overlooking the East Meadow and the ocean.

Professor Joanne Engel from UCSF Department of Medicine delivered first keynote on how the pathogen Chlamydia survives in the host cells. Despite the difficulty of growing the Chlamydia bacteria, her lab identified host genes and signal pathways that are involved in the infection, showing how the pathogen co-opts the host.

The second keynote was delivered by Professor Katherine Pollard from the Gladstone Institutes/UCSF, who did postdoctoral research on comparative genomics at UCSC. She presented an interesting project in her lab that discovered some transcription factor recognize DNA shape.

The symposium also featured a series of talks by postdocs from different scientific fields. Congratulations to Dr. Daniela Kielberg and Dr. Josh Parks for winning the Best Speaker prizes!

Daniela is a postdoc at the Department of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology. Her talk was titled “Spatial and temporal shifts in bacterial biogeography and gland occupation during the development of chronic infection”.

Josh is a postdoc in Holger Schmidt’s group at the Department of Electric Engineering. He talked about his work on optofluidic chip to detect single virus particle.

The symposium concluded with a poster session. Dr. Skander Hathroubi won the best poster prize!

We thank all of the symposium sponsors to make this event possible: the departments of MCD Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Biomolecular Engineering, METX, Office of Research, PBSci Division, Professor Josh Stuart and Two Pore Guys, Inc!!

Finally we thank the hard work of the three organizers: Diya, Hanh and Shankar!