The 7th Annual UW–Madison Postdoctoral Research Symposium was held on Friday, September 23rd, at the Discovery Building. Organized during National Postdoc Appreciation Week, the symposium offers a venue for UW–Madison postdocs to share their work and connection with other local postdocs.
7th Annual UW-Madison Postdoctoral Research Symposium
Friday, September 23rd
10:00 am Mindfulness Session
10:30 am Registration, coffee
10:45 am Symposium welcome and opening remarks
11:00 am Non-faculty Career Panel
– Rania Bashar, Senior Consultant, Moonshot Missions
– Adityarup Chakravorty, Senior Research Scientist, Promega
– Jonathan Lenz, Manager, Program Management, Catalent Pharma Solutions
– Torsheika Maddox, Senior Operations Officer and Chief of Staff to the Chief Diversity Officer, UW-Madison
– Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu, Co-Director, The Institute for Collective Well-Being; President, ECE Partners, LLC; Founder, The Purposeful PhD
– Moderator: Julie Kirsch, Postdoctoral Trainee
12:00 pm Lunch and networking
1:00 pm Faculty Teaching Panel
– Kassem Fawaz, Assistant Professor, Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Recipient of the Emil Steiger Teaching Award
– Stephen Meyers, Professor, Dept of Geoscience. Recipient of the Chancellor’s Teaching Innovation Award
– Asifa Quraishi-Landes, Professor of Law. Recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award
– Rosemary Russ, Associate Professor, Dept of Curriculum and Instruction. Recipient of the Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award
– Moderator: Jessica Maher, Associate Director, Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning
2:00 pm Coffee break
2:30 pm Blitz Talk Competition
3:45 pm Poster Session, Art Exhibit, Reception, Awards
5:30 pm Symposium ends
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Blitz Talk Competition - Judges' Choice Award: Kaylin Didier (Kinesiology)
Kaylin Didier, Kinesiology
Kaylin Didier is a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. William Schrage’s Bruno Balke Biodynamics lab. Our goal is to understand how our bodies regulate blood flow in skeletal muscle and the brain and how these change with disease. She focuses on the relationship and interaction of the immune and cardiovascular systems. She is currently investigating the effect of sex on the immune-vascular response to radiation.
Blitz Talk Competition - People's Choice Award: Lisa-Maria Needham (Chemistry)
Lisa-Maria Needham, Chemistry
Lisa-Maria is a postdoctoral fellow in the Goldsmith group and joined after completing her Ph.D. in Cambridge (across the pond). Lisa-Maria loves single molecules, and her current research is focused on developing new optical microcavity-enhanced methods for single-molecule light scattering. Her talk delved into the world of the nanoscale, what it means to be a billionth of a meter in size, and how we’re currently working to measure biological molecules on that scale.
Poster Competition - First Prize: Mykola Ialovega (Engineering Physics)
Mykola Ialovega, Engineering Physics
Dr. Mykola Ialovega is a research associate at the 3DPSI group led by Prof. Oliver Schmitz in the Engineering Physics Department. He is 29 years old—Ukrainian, who studied in Germany, Belgium, and France. His interests are art, architecture, music, cooking, traveling, and spending joyful time with family and friends. And, of course, science!
His poster, titled “Development of an absorbing first-wall interface for compact fusion devices,” won the 1st place Peoples’ Choice Poster Award at the 7th Annual Postdoctoral Symposium. It was very exciting and interesting to present the cold-spray technology for manufacturing and repair of plasma-facing components of fusion devices – the future devices to provide mankind with safe, non-carbon emitting, and virtually limitless energy.
Together with the Nuclear and Applied Materials Research Group led by Prof. Kumar Sridharan at the UW and several research institutions in Europe (FZ Juelich, Germany and Aix-Marseille University, France), we experiment using Tantalum cold-sprayed stainless-steel samples to demonstrate that such plasma-facing components withstand high particle and heat fluxes and can be used in laboratory fusion devices.
Poster Competition - Second Prize: Jizhe Cai (Engineering Physics)
Jizhe Cai, Engineering Physics
Dr. Jizhe Cai is a postdoctoral research associate in Thevamaran Lab in the Department of Engineering Physics. He studies the fundamental structure-property relationships in nanostructured materials and aims to design and deploy innovative material systems with extreme mechanical performances. His poster was about a recent project in which he elucidated the critical role of interfacial dynamic bonds in enhancing dynamic performances of nanofibrous material under supersonic impacts, which provides rational design strategies to achieve synergistically enhanced strength, toughness, and ballistic resistance.
2022 Postdoctoral Symposium Committee
- Houqian Li (C0-Chair), Chemical and Biological Engineering
- Ligia Moreira (C0-Chair), Animal and Dairy Sciences
- Kylee Morrison (C0-Chair), Institute for Molecular Virology and McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research
- Joshua Brown, School of Human Ecology
- Jamie Hibbert, Comparative Biosciences
- Julie Kirsch, Family Medicine and Community Health
- Khadijeh Masumnia-Bisheh, Biostatistics and Medical Informatics
- Sushant Mehan, Biological Systems Engineering
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