Graduate research conference links students across campus

With 100 posters on display and 370 registrants, this year’s Graduate Student Research Symposium on May 4 and 5 achieved the greatest participation in its five-year history. For the first time, the symposium was open to submissions by postdoctoral fellows as well as graduate students. Faculty members led mini-symposia in each of 10 research categories.

“We modeled it like a national conference,” said Shilpa Patel, who organized the conference with fellow pharmacology student Helen Seow. In a break from past years, posters were organized by interdisciplinary topics and presenters discussed their particular disciplines during poster mini-symposia. This allowed researchers to break out of their specialties and meet others at Yale who are working on a different aspects of common fields, Patel said. “Yale is a very collaborative environment to do science,” she added.

The event also featured talks by Nobel laureate Günter Blobel, M.D., Ph.D., and MIT biology professor Harvey Lodish, Ph.D. Lodish studies two classes of membrane proteins: transporters which move nutrients into and out of cells, and receptors which bind chemical signaling molecules in the environment of a cell and transmit these signals to the cell’s interior.

Blobel, a cell and molecular biologist at Rockefeller University, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell. During the symposium he gave the first George Palade Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Cell Biology in conjunction with the GSRS. The lecture honors Palade, the founder of the section of cell biology. Palade, himself a Nobel laureate in 1974, introduced Blobel via videotape from his home in California. In his talk, Blobel discussed the research that led to his discovery about signals in protein transport. He began in the 1970s by finding the signal that guides newly synthesized proteins through the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum. “What wasn’t known were the molecular mechanisms by which this pathway operated,” Blobel said. His pursuit of an answer to this question led to his subsequent discoveries.