BIO5 Institute postdoctoral fellows, faculty members, and students presented their cross-disciplinary work to address the world’s greatest scientific challenges at the 2021 Research to Innovation Showcase.
With a goal of promoting collaborations and sharing research discoveries, this annual event is open to researchers across the University of Arizona community and highlights the novel research supported and cultivated by the BIO5 Institute and performed by BIO5 faculty members and trainees.
The Research to Innovation Showcase also fulfills the presentation requirement for winners of the BIO5 Postdoctoral Fellowship, a competitive award that provides exceptional postdocs with monetary awards and professional development opportunities to support their pursuit of future honors, grants and positions.
The two-part virtual event consisted of a poster session and data blitz. More than 30 posters were presented, featuring topics such as infectious disease, computer-aided surgical training, neurodegenerative disease, reproductive health, and mathematical modeling. Attendees viewed and commented on posters through the VoiceThread platform during the week leading up to the data blitz.
In addition to creating and presenting posters, the eight 2021 BIO5 Postdoctoral Fellows presented their BIO5-funded research projects at the virtual Research Data Blitz on April 7. Their projects included addressing challenges in disease prevention and treatment, deciphering interactions between organisms, and uncovering structures and novel functions for cellular proteins, among others. Fellows were available in breakout rooms following their presentations for individual question and answer sessions.
The annual Research to Innovation Showcase is part of our Discover BIO5 series. To learn more about upcoming events as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of BIO5 throughout 2021, please visit https://discoverbio5.arizona.edu/.
About the University of Arizona BIO5 Institute
The BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona connects and mobilizes top researchers in agriculture, engineering, biomedicine, pharmacy, basic science, and computational science to find creative solutions to humanity’s most pressing health and environmental challenges. Since 2001, this interdisciplinary approach has been an international model of how to conduct collaborative research, and has resulted in disease prevention strategies, promising new therapies, innovative diagnostics and devices, and improved food crops.
About the Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF)
The Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF) that helped launch BIO5 in 2001 continues to be a catalyst in enabling effective, cross-disciplinary bioscience research and innovation at the University of Arizona, where initiatives and projects are carefully chosen to align with areas of state and national need. Over the past 20 years of TRIF, over $50M has been invested in building critical facilities and research services that UArizona is leveraging today to respond to the world’s greatest scientific mysteries. TRIF resources are also instrumental in funding events, programs and grants that promote STEM education, research and literacy.
