After the lectures, the audience moved into the open hallways to browse through poster presentations of research and discuss findings with the students. Examples included the effects of the western diet; genetic expression that can predict cancer; biological markers that could signal Parkinson's disease and genes related to prostate cancer among other lines of inquiry.

"I had the chance to work in a brand new field of cancer research that hasn't even been published yet," said Utsav Nandi, a second-year medical student, who worked with Vivek Mittal, principal investigator at the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Weill Cornell University Medical Center, New York, to explore a genetic fragment that was recently discovered to play a role in cancer metastasis. "This experience ”of learning new genetic research techniques and practicing them repeatedly to get results ”was extremely valuable to me."

"I'm proud of the results of the study I was working on," said Fadwa Fares, a first-year medical student who worked on a project involving ovarian tumor cells' resistance to heat therapy. Working in the WCMC-Q stem cell lab, under the guidance of Dr. Arash Rafii Tabrizi, head of stem cell research and assistant professor of genetic medicine, Fares helped discover a key factor that affects cancer cells response to therapy. "I hope that once they validate these results, we can apply them to ovarian cancer therapy and improve the technique."

medrnell/