• From left: Winners of the 2019 Undergraduate Research Poster Contest were Davis Zackaria, second place; Vanessa Anunobi, first place; and Virginia Blackwell, third place.

Seventy-one University of Texas at Dallas students showed off their research at the recent 2019 Undergraduate Research Poster Contest with the top three prizes going to students from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Vanessa Anunobi won first place in the competition with her project, “The Role of p62 in IL-1 Regulated Proliferation, Differentiation and Motility.” The biology senior’s mentor was Dr. Nikki Delk, assistant professor of biological sciences and Fellow, Cecil H. and Ida Green Professor in Systems Biology Science. The research examines inflammatory proteins that promote breast cancer progression and treatment resistance, with the goal of identifying signaling pathways in cells that could be used for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Mathematics senior Davis Zackaria placed second while Virginia Blackwell, a biochemistry senior, took third.

The contest, presented by the Office of Undergraduate Education, awarded cash prizes to the top three entrants, chosen from 15 semifinalists by a panel of judges from local companies.

The contest’s judges were Kent Pride, engineering director, university partnerships at Raytheon; Dave Williamson BS’98, MS’02, MS’03, founding member and vice president for geoscience at Monadnock Resources LLC.; Dr. Tim Rost, with the research and consortia program in the technology and manufacturing group at Texas Instruments Inc.; Steve Zimmel, vice president, head of Integration Center of Excellence at Ericsson; and Max Frazier, enterprise technology manager at State Farm.