Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Sofia Karter Lopez, University of Toronto

“Rab11 mediates E-cadherin recycling during embryonic wound healing.”

2nd Place: Elizabeth Graham, Georgetown University

“The impact of cell cycle and sex on DNA double-strand break repair pathway choice.”

3rd Place: Leila Lin, University of California, Irvine

“Fast evolving genes involved in heterochromatin function.” 

Graduate Students

1st Place: Audrey Williams, University of Chicago

“Fat2 polarizes Lar and Sema5c to coordinate the motility of collectively migrating epithelial cells.”

2nd Place: Brook Falk, The Hospital for Sick Children

“Eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E-5 is required for spermiogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster.”  

3rd Place: Matthew Lindsay, University of Rochester

“Investigating the maintenance of the Responder satellite in Drosophila melanogaster.”

Congratulations to all the winners of poster awards at the 2022 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference!

Undergraduate Students

First Place: Rachel Eder
Arizona State University
Poster Title: Understanding the heterogeneity in gene regulatory responses to misfolded protein toxicity

Second Place: Doran Goldman
Stanford University
Poster Title: Effect of inoculation dose on colonization success in gut-derived microbial communities

Graduate Students

First Place: Elena Romero
University of Washington
Poster Title: High viral load is associated with elevated recombination rate in intra-host HIV populations.

Second Place: Maike Morrison
Stanford University
Poster Title:  FSTruct: An FST-based tool for quantifying ancestry variability

Third Place: Atoosa M Samani
University of Utah
Poster Title: Unravelling the Genetic Architecture of Rolling Behavior in the Domestic Pigeon (Columba livia)

We are pleased to announce the GSA Poster Award winners from the 63rd Annual Drosophila Research Conference! Undergraduate and graduate student members of the GSA were eligible for the awards, and a hard-working team of postdocs volunteered their time as judges. Congratulations to all!

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Abby Matt, Washington University in St. Louis

“Graphene Enabled Optical Control of Drosophila.”

2nd Place: Grace Woods, Lewis and Clark College

“The role of Thrombospondin in development and function of the Drosophila melanogaster neuromuscular junction.”

3rd Place: Jennifer McIntyre, University of California, Irvine

“Environmental Effects on the Epigenetic Silencing of Transposable Elements.”

Graduate Students

1st Place: Aarya Vaikakkara Chithram, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

“Developmental axon guidance cues are critical for adult neuronal survival.”

2nd Place: Maren Janz, University of Osnabrück  

“Endosomal maturation in Drosophila nephrocytes depends on a trimeric Rab7 GEF complex.”

3rd Place: Menglin Li, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Rhodopsin 3 regulates circadian periodicity.”

We are pleased to announce the GSA Poster Award winners from the 62nd Annual Drosophila Research Conference! Undergraduate and graduate student members of the GSA were eligible for the awards, and a hard-working team of postdocs volunteered their time as judges. Congratulations to all!

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Umayr R. Shaikh

Institution: Butler University

Poster Title: “Exploring size scaling relationships in the developing Drosophila egg chamber”

2nd Place: Sarah Sims

Institution: University of Alabama at Birmingham

Poster Title: “Consequences of the Loss of Multiple HP1 Proteins in Drosophila melanogaster“

3rd Place: Abigail Wukitch

Institution: Bucknell University

Poster Title: “The limits of chronic infection induced protection during secondary infection in Drosophila melanogaster“

Graduate Students

1st Place: Mehrnaz Afkhami مهرناز افخمی

Institution: University of Oklahoma

Poster Title: “The genetic and neuronal bases of a coevolved reproductive trait in female Drosophila“

2nd Place: Alexander J. Barron

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

Poster Title: “Drosophila gut bacteria regulate the growth of invasive microbes both in culture and in the host gut environment”

3rd Place: Jullien Flynn

Institution: Cornell University

Poster Title: “Multiple sex chromosome-autosome fusions associated with high satellite DNA content in Drosophila virilis“

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries. 

If you would like to contribute to this series, please contact Communications Assistant Jacqueline Treboschi.

Early career members of the GSA community share how they are adjusting to the career uncertainty, lab shutdowns, and isolation caused by COVID-19.

“The COVID-19 shutdown has greatly slowed the progression of our work, which, unfortunately, is aging focused. Our institution has taken appropriate steps in closing down the university for all but non-essential work. Luckily, I am able to continue to feed colonies, however, the delay of experiments make me and others in my position worried about how this delay in progress will be viewed by hiring committees.”
—Balint Kacsoh, Postdoc at University of Pennsylvania

“One of my favorite things about my lab is our camaraderie, and its absence has made it particularly hard to adjust to working remotely. After just five days of social distancing, I found myself unable to focus meaningfully on any work-related task, and my daily schedule slowly devolved into an amorphous mess. To counteract loneliness and keep up motivation, my lab and I established Write Club. We meet in our virtual Zoom cafe, where we spend 15-30 minutes chatting, 90 minutes writing, and a final 15 minutes sharing our progress (or even the lack thereof). We initially agreed to meet for Write Club on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but it’s been so effective that you’ll find us there most days of the work week. Having a daily bit of interaction with my labmates has helped enormously – we all help keep each other accountable for making progress on our projects. But more importantly, we can re-capture a little of our lab’s magic by catching up, commiserating, and lending emotional support when we most need it.”
—Teresa Lee, Postdoc at Emory University

“I am struggling with productivity during this time. With not being able to go to lab anymore, many things I felt were almost finished now feel much further off. I am doing my best to remember that we are all going through this and to break up my goals into smaller pieces.”
—Gavin Rice, Postdoc at University of Pittsburgh

“Being a non-citizen during quarantine has a negative impact on mental health because you feel constantly anxious about family and friends living in another country; whether you’ll keep getting paid while you’re working from home; visa renewals; and job continuation.”
—Seyma Katrinli, Postdoc at Emory University

“Most of our laboratory’s work has shifted to working from home. Online meetings are working well so far. Students have been asked to move out of the university’s residences in several cities. While some universities are making it mandatory, others are allowing some of the residents to stay if they do not have anywhere else to go. In my case, I am going to move out because I had started planning to do so before the pandemic started, but this is likely not the case for everybody. Some friends have defended their theses in online meetings; at least one of them faced technical difficulties.”
—Angel Fernando Cisneros Caballero, Graduate Student at Université Laval

We are pleased to announce the GSA Poster Award winners from the 60th Annual Drosophila Research Conference! Undergraduate and graduate student members of the GSA were eligible for the awards, and a hard-working team of postdocs volunteered their time as judges. Congratulations to all!

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Tanner Call

Institution: Brigham Young University – Provo

Poster Title: The gut microbiome as a driver of host dietary preference in Drosophila melanogaster

2nd Place: Jasmina Abdalla

Institution: George Washington University

Poster Title: Epigenetic Inheritance of Alcohol Sensitivity in Drosophila melanogaster

3rd Place: Sylvia Durkin

Institution: The Rockefeller University

Poster Title: Chemosensory and Behavioral Evolution in Drosophila suzukii: Implications for Adaptive Pest Activity

Graduate Students

1st Place: Hongru Hu

Institution: Florida State University

Poster Title: Genomic and neurogenetic approaches reveal a role of dpr- and DIP-expressing neurons in courtship behaviors

2nd Place: Kayla Gjelsvik

Institution: MDI Biological Laboratory and University of Maine

Poster Title: Polyploid cell growth restores tissue mechanics post injury

3rd Place: Natalie Vaisman

Institution: Boston University

Poster Title: A gut filling: the kinetics of the Wolbachia colonization in Drosophila guts

We are pleased to announce the GSA Poster Award winners from the 59th Annual Drosophila Research Conference! Undergraduate and graduate student members of the GSA were eligible for the awards, and a hard-working team of postdocs volunteered their time as judges. Congratulations to all!

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Elizabeth Hemenway

Institution: University of Missouri-Kansas City

Poster Title: The Surprising composition of a synaptonemal polycomplex

Authors: Elizabeth Hemenway, Stacie Hughes, R. Scott Hawley

2nd Place: Emily Rivard

Institution: College of the Holy Cross

Poster Title: De novo evolved genes have essential roles in male Drosophila reproduction

Authors: Emily Rivard, E. Scott, J. Schmitz, K. Kelleher, E. Bornberg-Bauer, Geoffrey Findlay

3rd Place: Leah Anderson

Institution: The Ohio State University

Poster Title: Determining binding specificities of cell adhesion molecules from Drosophila and other related Dipterans

Authors: Leah Anderson and Mark Seeger

Graduate Students

1st Place: Erez Cohen

Institution: Duke University Medical School

Poster Title: A switch from compensatory proliferation to compensatory hypertrophy in the injured Drosophila hindgut

Authors: Erez Cohen, S. Allen, Don Fox

2nd Place: Ankita Sarkar

Institution: University of Dayton

Poster Title: Wingless, a mediator of crosstalk between Amyloid-beta 42 expressing and wild-type neurons in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Ankita Sarkar, J. Kofler, M. Kango-Singh, Amit Singh

3rd Place: Jackie Bubnell

Institution: Cornell University

Poster Title: Expanding functional horizons or evolutionary combat? Evaluating drivers of the rapid evolution of bag of marbles in Drosophila.

Authors: Jackie Bubnell and Chip Aquadro

During my many interactions with grad students and postdocs, I have learned that a large number of early career scientists train on campuses where important career development services are not widely available. While some schools may provide a diverse array of such services, at many other institutions the only opportunity to enhance early career training outside the lab is through attendance at conferences and local symposia. Here at the GSA, we recognize the importance of offering career development training in a variety of different forums. To increase accessibility of these programs, we provide graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to apply for Career Development Symposia grants. These awards allow students and postdocs to organize local symposia that provide career and professional development opportunities for early career scientists.

As with any competitive application, it can be a bit intimidating knowing where and how to begin. Here, I’ll provide you with a few tips for a successful Career Development Symposia grant application.

Know the requirements and formatting

We’ve all heard stories about grant applications being triaged for minor errors in formatting. With all of the effort that goes into creating a well-crafted application, the last thing anyone wants is for a minor detail to take you out of the running. While we are not strict about margins or fonts, we do have some basic requirements. The most common mistakes we see for CDS grant applications is exceeding the 2-page proposal and CV limits. Be sure to carefully read through the application instructions.

Understand your audience

For these awards, you need to think about two audiences: the committee reviewing your application and future attendees.

In the application, tell us why the meeting is important to your attendees. Are you addressing a gap in knowledge that you identified? Are you providing networking opportunities with industry professionals that are not common in your area? Whatever the reason, make it clear and provide supporting evidence.

The committee needs to clearly understand how your meeting provides career development training. We often receive applications for scientific symposia that focus on the importance of the science. While this is important for the committee to know, the primary focus of the application should be on the career development opportunities to the organizers and attendees. Stating that graduate students and postdocs will have an opportunity to present their work is great. But that alone is not sufficient for a successful application. Think about how you can raise the bar beyond traditional presentations. Tell us about how the event provides a leadership opportunity for the organizers, add a structured networking event, or even provide a mini workshop on presentation skills at the start or end of the day.

Identifying and articulating career development opportunities is a key factor for success!

Have clear plans

Agenda – Organizing an event takes careful thought and detailed planning. In your application, provide a detailed agenda. This is the place where you can raise the bar a bit. Rather than simply listing the time and name of each session, provide a list of skills developed by attendees or highlight the numbers of early career speakers.

Budget – Many applicants ask me if including other sources of financial support is detrimental for their application. The answer is no. In fact, knowing that organizers have a plan of action for obtaining additional funding provides confidence that the event will be successful. It also demonstrates that other groups also see the event as valuable and relevant.

Advertising – In your application, be sure to not overlook adding information about your advertising and promotion plans. It seems like a minor detail but we want to know that you’ve thought about effective ways to advertise using a realistic timeline.

I hope these tips help to demystify the application process for these awards. We look forward to reading an application from you in the near future.

On a spring day in 2006, I woke up from surgery to learn that I had an aggressive type of breast cancer that would require chemotherapy.

I had been told I had a relatively benign diagnosis that was supposed to be cured by a mastectomy. It was devastating to realize that the surgery was not the end of it. I was a cancer patient. This was real.

But there was good news, too: a clinical trial had recently demonstrated the effectiveness of a particular drug, Herceptin, for early-stage cancers of this same aggressive subtype. Herceptin was an antibody designed to target the HER2 protein that had gone rogue in my cancer cells. It was perhaps the earliest example of precision medicine: a new vision of healthcare tailored to the genes, environment, and lifestyle of each individual.

After eight sickening weeks of conventional chemotherapy and a year of Herceptin infusions, I was done with treatment. After five cancer-free years, the doctors declared me cured.

I may well owe my life to these drugs. Adding Herceptin treatment to chemotherapy is estimated to improve chances of survival in cases like mine by about a third.

But it was not “science” in the abstract that threw me a lifeline. Scientists did—people working hard, making sacrifices, struggling with funding and broken equipment and the hundreds of other daily challenges of research.

Taxing graduate training

Knowing the kind of dedication such advances take is why it was so disheartening when, the week before Thanksgiving, the House of Representatives approved a tax bill that if it became law would end the career of countless scientists and throttle scientific progress in the process.

Their proposal would artificially inflate the taxable income of grad students, increasing their tax bills by up to 400%. This would make advanced training inaccessible to many promising students, unless they happened to be wealthy.

Thankfully, the Senate did not include the plan to tax tuition waivers in their version of the bill. But in fighting this disastrous proposal, students, faculty and other advocates have been forced to spend a frustrating few weeks defending graduate education.

From the lab to the clinic

We have been asked why the public should care about whether or not grad students get to pursue their research dreams. One answer is that graduate training is vital to science and innovation in this country.

Consider Herceptin, the drug that helped me.

One of the keys to Herceptin’s success as a drug was that the original mouse antibody designed to target HER2 was subsequently made safe for use humans—if physicians had injected me with the mouse version of the antibody, my body’s immune response would have recognized the foreign protein as an invader and mounted an attack.

To get around this, Genentech, the biotech company that developed Herceptin, “humanized” the antibody by replacing 95% of the protein with the human equivalents. They were successful in this innovation in part thanks to the expertise of Paul Carter, fresh from his graduate school training in the laboratory of Greg Winter at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Winter’s group had been the first to successfully humanize mouse antibodies.

Examples like this are more than commonplace; public investment in research training has long been crucial for the survival of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. After all, scientists first learn how to be scientists in graduate school.

In fact, many such industries were born from academic research. Genentech was the first company to successfully use genetic engineering to create a drug (recombinant human insulin). The company was co-founded by an academic researcher and its early success was built largely on discoveries made in Bay Area university labs in the 1970s. And of course, on discoveries made by graduate students.

For example, in 1971, UCSF graduate student Robert Yoshimori isolated an enzyme from a clinical sample of E. coli bacteria. This new enzyme, named EcoRI, cut DNA only at the site of specific sequences. Another graduate student, Janet Mertz at Stanford, discovered that the cut DNA ends were “sticky”—which meant that they could be easily joined with any other DNA molecule cut by EcoRI. These discoveries revealed a simple and fast method to unite DNA from different sources into one combined molecule—a pivotal moment in the widespread adoption of recombinant DNA methods, and the technology that brought us Herceptin.

You see, grad students make contributions to science as part of their training. It’s one of the criteria for graduating from most PhD programs. If grad students are taxed out of existence, not only is the future scientific workforce weakened, but the many discoveries those students would have made during their training are hindered, or worse, lost.

Not all grad students remain researchers. Even fewer will remain in academia. But grad school training is vital preparation for many careers that make a difference to society. Even once Herceptin was developed, countless PhD-trained scientists were needed to shepherd the drug through the long process of bringing the drug to market. These patent lawyers, clinical trial coordinators, statisticians, FDA evaluators, regulatory writers, and many others may not fit your picture of a cancer scientist, but nevertheless, they were essential to making this drug an option for patients like me.

Potential losses beyond measure

I received my diagnosis just before Herceptin was approved by the FDA for use in early-stage cases. I would have missed out had the development and testing of the drug been slowed by staff shortages. I may have lost my life if this process had been delayed because the best people for the job had never become scientists at all.

As the Dean of a graduate school, I have daily opportunities to witness the creativity and dedication of grad students—and not just in my own field of biomedical science. Tracing their contributions to a particular innovation or product is in many ways an impossible thought experiment, because without PhD training, there are no researchers. If grad students are priced out of this system, the research enterprise will suffer immeasurable losses. Higher education will suffer. Industry will suffer. The economy will suffer. Ultimately, everyone will suffer—including those who will miss out on lifesaving medical treatments.

How you can make a difference now

What can we do to safeguard graduate education? There is still time to call your representatives while they reconcile the House and Senate bills. Ask them to ensure that the final act retains provision 117(d)(5) that makes student tuition waivers non-taxable. Ask them to retain other protections that make college more accessible, including keeping employee tuition benefits as non-taxable and allowing student loan interest to be tax deductible.  Contribute your story to our awareness campaign. Tell your family and friends about the importance of research and graduate training. Tell the grad students you know that you value them and their many contributions. And don’t stop keeping an eye to their future, because it just might impact yours.

What is #GradTax about?

The US research enterprise is under threat by proposed tax changes that would make it difficult for all but the wealthiest students to undertake graduate training. Restricting access to advanced training would damage the nation’s ability to grow, innovate, discover new medicines, bring new technologies to market, and adapt to a changing world. On November 16th, the US House of Representatives passed H.R.1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which contains language to repeal a number of tax provisions for education. This repeal is not included the Senate’s version of the bill—now under consideration. Scientists and many others are fighting to ensure these important provisions are preserved in the final version of the legislation, slated to be passed by the end of the year.

Why should I care?

If you’ve ever benefitted from science, technology, or higher education, then you should care about this issue. Think about antibiotics—or the GPS in your cellphone—or the education provided by your local university. They all depend on graduate-level training and a skilled workforce. If the only people able to undertake research training were the independently wealthy, our knowledge—and prosperity—would dwindle. If you have any doubt, meet some of the students who would be excluded from research and learn about some of the important work that would halt in the face of these proposals.

What effect would the proposals have?

H.R.1 would remove student loan interest deductions, the Hope Scholarship Credit, the Lifetime Learning Credit, educational assistance programs, and a provision that ensures tuition waivers do not count as taxable income for graduate students.

Losing this last provision alone would add a significant tax burden to graduate students, drastically reducing their net income and likely making graduate education unaffordable for many. PhD-level students in the US are generally supported by stipends, and their university tuition is waived in return for teaching and research. Graduate students do not directly receive any portion of this tuition waiver.

What will students pay in real-world dollars?

It depends on the institution, but most students will likely see their taxes nearly doubled. Those at high-tuition schools will owe closer to four times their usual tax bill.

Graduate students in our field typically receive annual stipends of between $20,000–$35,000. Tuition varies greatly among institutions, with some state schools clocking in around $12,000 per year and some private institutions reaching $40,000 per year—and beyond.

For example, a single student receiving a $24,000 stipend from an institution with $10,000 in tuition would currently owe roughly $1,600 in taxes for 2017. Under H.R.1, this would increase to $2,600. A student at a different institution receiving a $34,000 stipend and a $50,000 tuition waiver would see a staggering increase—from $3,100 under the current law to a whopping $12,100 under H.R.1.

What can I do to help?

GSA joined other scientific societies in opposing this aspect of the bill before it was passed by the House. For tax reform to become law, the House and Senate bills must be identical, so some measure of reconciliation will have to occur between the two versions. Now, as the Senate considers its own version of the legislation, both scientists and the public need to make their voices heard.

Let your Senators know that you support graduate education and the tax-free status of tuition waivers.

Find your Members of Congress.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about the impacts in this article from Wired. 
• Read what the largest association of scientists in the nation has to say.
• Read a first-hand account of the impacts in the New York Times.
• Practical advice for lobbying Congress on this issue.
• Advice on writing an op-ed.

Share your story:

To spread awareness of this issue, GSA is highlighting some of the faces of graduate research from our community. If you are concerned about these issues, share your story and your research impacts with us via this brief form. Read GSA President Lynn Cooley’s personal story connecting graduate education with the medical treatment that saved her life.

Scroll down to read the posts: