2009 SOLAR Alumni

Name	Undergraduate Institution	Host Lab at UNC	Project Title	Where are they now?
Maralisi Rivera Torres	University of Puerto Rico at Cayey	Dr. Frank Church	Role of MAPK Signaling Pathway on the Expression of Urokinase Plasminogen Activator and Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1	Maralisi graduated last spring from the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey.
Roberta Robles	University of Puerto Rico at Cayey	Dr. Fernando Pardo	Marker Assisted Inbreeding in the Advanced Generations of the Collaborative Cross: Chromosomes 7, 9 and 11	Roberta is a senior at UPR this spring and applied to UNC-Chapel Hill's Medical Education Program.
Desinia Johnson	North Carolina Central University	Dr. James Swenberg	A Novel Method for Measuring Glycidamide from Hemoglobin Adducts	Desinia will graduate in 2010 and has been accepted into UNC's PREP program.
Justin Brown	Winston-Salem State University	Dr. Bill Coleman	Development of a Practical Molecular Diagnostic Assay to Distinguish Multiple Primary Cancer from Metastatic Disease in the Respiratory Systemn and Aerodigestive Tract	Justin is doing an internship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory studying how to more efficiently convert glucose and other carbohydrates into biofuels.
Joel (Joe) Durand	Grambling State University	Dr. Monte Willis	Construction of Recombinant Plasmids to Investigate the Interaction of MuRF1 and PPARα in Cardiac Metabolic Adaptation	Joe graduated suma cum laude in December 2009 and was accpeted into UNC-Chapel Hill's and UT southwestern's PhD programs. He is currently working in Bernard Weissman's lab at UNC.
Michael Gomez Melendez	University of Puerto Rico at Cayey	Dr. Alisa Wohlberg	The Effect of Reduced Plasma Factor V on Clot Structure	Michael is still studying at UPR and was recently accepted into the U of Wisconsin - Madison's summer research program.
Luis Lopez Gonzalez	University of Puerto Rico at Cayey	Dr. Marilla Cordeiro-Stone	Mapping the Interacting Domain of Tipin with Timeless	Luis will graduate in 2010 and has been accepted into UNC's PREP program working with Kevin Weeks in the Chemistry Department.
Navpreet (Naps) Tung	Delaware State University	Dr. David Kaufman	Loss of Replicative Pausing Near Early Origins may be a Common Characteristic of Cancer Cells	Naps won a poster award at a national conference based on his 2009 summer research. In the summer of 2010 he did summer research at the University of Delaware focusing on prostate cancer. He will graduate in December 2010 and will be busy applying to Ph.D programs this fall for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Arlene Martinez	University of Puerto Rico at Cayey	Dr. Karen Molke	Transcriptional activity of SNPs at the GALNT2 locus associated with human high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels	Arlene is a senior at UPR and was accepted as an Endocrine Society Scholar. As such she will pursue her interests in type I diabetes research this summer at a lab in the Baylor College of Medicine's SMART program.

Click here to download the abstracts of the 2009 SOLAR scholars