April 18, 2024 — With research tackling topics from muscle weakness to cancer, viruses and more, students in the UF College of Medicine’s Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences are aiming to address medical mysteries that can impact the lives of millions of patients globally.

On April 17, eight UF Medicine graduate students presented their thesis research to an audience of peers and mentors during the 49th annual Medical Guild Research Symposium in the George T. Harrell, M.D., Medical Education Building.

Competing for prizes ranging from $1,000-$2,500 endowed by the UF Medical Guild Inc., each student represented their biomedical sciences concentration to a panel of faculty judges. Their research explored complications and conditions like skeletal muscle weakness, neonatal norovirus, breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

David Bloom, Ph.D., director of the UF Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences and interim associate dean for graduate education at the college, said he was impressed by each of the presenters at this year’s event.

“Each year I come to this, it seems like it gets better, as the eight talks were absolutely fantastic,” he said. “A competition like this helps them in their skills in presenting their research, and equally important, it helps train them to speak to the public and talk about the important work that’s being done here in biomedical sciences.”

Natalie Johnson, a doctoral candidate and upcoming spring 2024 graduate in the department of pharmacology and therapeutics, received top marks from this year’s panel of faculty judges for her presentation, “Sniffing is initiated by dopamine’s actions on ventral striatum neurons.”

She said her mentor, Daniel Wesson, Ph.D., an associate professor and chair of the department of pharmacology and therapeutics and interim director of the UF Center for Smell and Taste, helped her greatly with her research, along with incoming UF doctoral candidate Anamaria Cotelo.

“Many of the similar systems in the brain that mediate reward and addictive behaviors, we found also mediate the behavior of sniffing,” said Johnson, who will join the faculty at West Chester University in Pennsylvania as an assistant professor following graduation. “I think it’s hard sometimes to convey sniffing as being important, so it feels good that it’s able to be appreciated by a broader audience.”