The Midwest Yeast Meeting was held on Oct. 5 in Evanston, Illinois.

Several biology students presented.

Four graduate students and one undergraduate student from Dr. Kyoungtae Kim’s lab presented their research. Kim is an associate dean for CNAS.

• Cullen Horstmann (graduate): “Transcriptome profile analysis with various nanomaterial in Saccharomyces cerevisiae”
• Vy Nguyen (graduate): “Traffic of Snc1 and Vps10 via myosin-based motility”
• Ehsan Suez (graduate): “Novel function of Vps1 on membrane fusion”
• Ryan Windish (graduate): “Assessment of Vps1 targeting and effects of ubiquitin-binding residue mutations in Vps1”
• Onika Olson (undergraduate): “Dynamin-assisted proteoliposome fusion”

About the conference

At the meeting, more than 10 speakers and almost 50 posters were showcased.

The Midwest Yeast Meeting is a good place to make connections and get feedback from faculty from a variety of other universities.

Each student felt they learned something valuable, from connections to new research.

“I was also able to have one-on-one conversations with peers and faculty which helped me to find out more about their individual research topics,” Olson said.

Nguyen echoed that, saying she was inspired.

“Thanks to the valuable conversations I came up with some ideas that I can try out to improve my current project when I came back school,” Nguyen said. “I would say that attending the conference was one of the best ways to inspire myself and help my research.”

Windish enjoyed presenting his research to others.

“It was truly amazing to be able to present some of the research we have done here at MSU with scientists that have contributed so much in this field,” Windish said. “To have them engaged and asking questions was a humbling experience.”

Others enjoyed talking about their common interest—yeast research.

“It’s always nice to hear about new research, especially when it’s so similar to your own,” Horstmann said. “Everyone there conducted research with yeast, making it familiar and enjoyable for a fellow yeast researcher. I made some connections that, hopefully, could help me when applying for PhD programs in the future.”

Suez felt the same way.

“It was a delightful experience to see how diversified research works are being done by some of the top tier cell biologists using the same model organism, yeast,” Suez said. “It was a great experience to motivate myself for conducting better quality research!”