I recently held a flash 48 hour contest for free tickets to the World Alliance Forum on the future of stem cells at which Yamanaka and others will be speaking.
Congrats to the winners, Sai Vemula and Johnathon Anderson.
Here are their winning entries.
Sai Vemula
Editor, SSSCR-International, UC Berkeley, Molecular and Cell Biology B.A.
This forum provides a unique opportunity to get a glimpse of the field from national and global perspectives and lets me go beyond the science and learn about various economical, regulatory and policy related issues. As an undergraduate I have been an instructor for a stem cell class, outreach educator and an advocate. Meetings like these offer me a platform to forge new connections with researchers from multiple disciplines to better develop my understanding, as I form the next steps in my career. In particular I am interested in learning about drug development process and designing of clinical trials.
Johnathon D. Anderson
I’m eminently interested in developing novel therapeutics, a spark of passion that was perhaps flamed by my mother’s passing from cancer some years ago. I’m attempting to marry my high-throughput sequencing and molecular biology backgrounds into characterizing and high-jacking a recently elucidated new cell to cell communication system that all mammalian cells, including stem cells appear to use (exosomes, microvesicles). I work in a translational lab on adult stem cells and I would absolutely love that opportunity to talk science and the future of the field with some of the great minds that will be there.