January is National Mentoring Month in the U.S., and January 17th is International Mentoring Day. Mentor.org is one of many organizations that promotes mentoring and encourages a community “to come together to ignite those passions and help turn those wildest dreams into reality.” At UAPB, we value mentoring throughout the year and applaud the accomplishments of our students and faculty who learn, teach, and mentor. Joel Ruzindana’s UAPB Physics Poster’s first place award at the AR INBRE Conference proves the positive results attained through mentoring and reinforces the old African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Through the power of mentoring, three UAPB undergraduate students won Arkansas INBRE poster presentation awards at the AR INBRE (IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence) Research Conference in late 2023 in Fayetteville, AR. They were UAPB undergraduates Joel Ruzindana, First Place Poster Presentation Award in Physics; Kennedy Abanihe, Honorable Mention Poster Presentation Award in Physics; and Fidaus Razak, Honorable Mention Poster Presentation Award in Chemistry and Biochemistry.
The two-day Arkansas INBRE Research Conference involves participation from colleges and universities in Arkansas and surrounding states in biological sciences, physics and chemistry, and biochemistry. The 2023 Conference booklet referenced 25 participating institutions from Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee.
The student involvement included hundreds of undergraduate oral and poster presentations based on their submitted and accepted biology, chemistry, and physics abstracts. Student oral presentations included a 12-minute talk followed by a three-minute Q&A. UAPB undergraduate Sharae Gipson was one of six students invited to give an oral presentation based on her Chemistry abstract. However, the UAPB undergraduate 2023 INBRE Conference poster presentation award winners and their mentors mentioned below secured both first place and honorable mention awards:
- Joel Ruzindana, First Place Poster Presentation Award in Physics with UAPB Mentors: Drs. Mansour Moratzavi & Manoj Shah. The award is based on abstract 209: Modeling of III-V-on-Sapphire Waveguides for Sapphire-based Photonic Integrated Circuits Platform.
- Kennedy Abanihe, Honorable Mention Poster Presentation Award in Physics with UAPB Mentors: Drs. Mansour Moratzavi & Manoj Shah. The award is based on abstract 200: Ordering-Disordering of GeSn films using RAMAN Spectroscopy.
- Fidaus Razak, Honorable Mention Poster Presentation Award in Chemistry and Biochemistry with UAPB Mentor: Dr. Qinglong Jiang. The award is based on abstract 117B: 3D Hollow Nanobeads and Drug Delivery.
Faculty and students participated in biology, chemistry, and physics platform sessions, faculty plenary talks, networking, and a keynote seminar speaker presentation from Kim Orth, Ph.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center on “Black Spot, Black Death, Black Pearl: Tales of Bacterial Pathogens.”
Dr. Mortazavi, Vice Chancellor and Professor of Quantum Optics Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development, also thanks the UAPB team, which included Dr. Qinglong Jiang, professor of Chemistry, Dr. Joseph Onyilagha, Interim Director of Undergraduate Research, and postdocs Drs. Manoj Shah, Rabindra Basnet, Ms. Azarin Yazdani, and Ms. Genevia Thomas for working and facilitating students’ work and conference accommodations.
Learn more about Biology and the Chemistry and Physics departments at http://www.UAPB.edu. The Arkansas INBRE sponsors this conference. It is hosted by the Biological Sciences, Physics and Chemistry, and Biochemistry departments at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, University of Arkansas.
Here are some upcoming events shared by Arkansas INBRE at the conference.
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