The 15th OIGP Spring Reception will place on Wednesday, May 1st, 2024 in the North & South Ballrooms in the Purdue Memorial Union. New this year we will be have two different panel discussions focused on academic and industry career path experiences followed by a closing keynote from the 2020 MOIPA winner, Dr. Samarth Mathur.
Panel Speakers
Academic Panel:
Carly Kimiecik is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Public Health at Purdue University. Recently, she successfully defended her dissertation and will graduate in May 2024. Carly has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the Department of Family Science and Social Work at Miami University (OH), starting in August 2024. Her research focuses on promoting equitable health and development for all youth through community-engaged approaches. She also investigates and addresses health disparities and implements and evaluates programs to improve the health and wellbeing of youth. Carly’s interdisciplinary work merges community-engaged positive youth development (PYD) strategies with a socioecological framework. During her time at Purdue, Carly managed a Public Health Research lab, taught and mentored students, and contributed to funded research on homelessness and social determinants of health. She also worked as a graduate research assistant for the Purdue University Center for Health Equity and Innovation (CHEqI). In this role, Carly conducted community-engaged initiatives, secured funding, developed and sustained bi-directional partnerships with community-based organizations, and contributed to health equity initiatives. Carly holds a Master of Social Work from The Ohio State University. Previously, she worked in sports-based PYD programming and in College Athletics with at-risk Division One student-athletes, supporting their academic performance. Although she loves her work, Carly enjoys running, playing and watching sports, going for walks, and listening to podcasts and music.
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Sydney completed her undergraduate work at Kent State University before earning her PhD at the University of Vermont, where her work examined mechanisms of associative learning. She conducted her postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before starting her independent research at Purdue. In the Trask Lab, they study the ways the brain encodes, stores, retrieves, and updates memory with a particular focus on how these processes change throughout the lifespan.
Industry Panel:
Dan Newkirk is the Director of Energy Solutions for Alpha Controls & Services. He started working at Alpha as an Energy Engineer after graduating with his master’s in mechanical engineering technology and the Ecological Sciences and Engineering program in 2014. Since then, he has earned his Professional Engineer license and just traveled to Washington, DC last week to accept the EPA’s Energy Star Partner of the Year award on behalf of Alpha Controls.
Conrrad Nicholls is a Scientist I at Eradivir Inc. He received his Ph.D. in Structural Virology and his MPH in Environmental Health from Purdue University in December 2023 and December 2022, respectively. During his tenure as a PhD candidate, Dr. Nicholls studied a group of arboviruses shown to cause significant human disease, known as flaviviruses. His primary focus was to develop a better understanding of the assembly mechanisms of flaviviruses, particularly how the nucleocapsid core of individual virions are packaged into their membrane envelopes. His efforts resulted in two research manuscripts and a patent, each of which are expected to be submitted for publication / patent approval in 2024. Dr. Nicholls was able to support his graduate research through several professional awards, including an NIH F32 Training Grant and an NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellowship. In addition, he also gained a deep appreciation for teaching during his 3-year TA-ship for the upper-level courses “Principles of Physiology” and “Animal Physiology”. Aside from academic pursuits, Dr. Nicholls also served as the President of the Polynesian Cultural Club of Purdue University, Co-Chair for the Graduate Assistant Development Team, Co-Chair for the PULSe Science in Schools Program, and as a Planning Committee member for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Biomolecular Galaxy Symposium. His current research projects with Eradivir Inc. focus on the development of novel immune targeting bi-specific antiviral therapies for numerous virus species, including Influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, and dengue virus.
Rachel Nolan is a toxicologist who specializes in ensuring safety of medical devices. She got her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Benedictine College and then attended Purdue University, where she obtained her PhD in neurobiology/toxicology from the PULSe program. During her PhD studies, she had an internship at Cook Biotech Inc as a Toxicology Intern, where she learned about how medical devices are regulated and the type of safety data necessary to market a device. After graduating, she joined Cook Biotech Inc in 2020, where she started as a Regulatory Scientist. She was on a team that produced submissions to regulatory authorities in Europe to maintain medical devices on the market there, performed regulatory assessments to determine the necessary steps to produce new medical devices, and worked on the risk documentation for current and new medical devices. In 2022, she transitioned to being a Toxicologist at Cook Biotech Inc. In this role, she performs biocompatibility and toxicity assessments of medical devices and works closely with the other departments to ensure medical devices are safe for use in their respective medical area. She has performed safety testing for novel materials as well as created the safety documentation for medical devices undergoing evaluation to get into the new European medical device market.
Closing Keynote Speaker
Samarth Mathur, PhD Bioinformatics Analyst at Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research
Dr. Samarth Mathur is a bioinformatics scientist with over 8 years of research experience in the field of evolutionary genomics and computational biology. At Frederick National Lab, Samarth is a member of the Center for Cancer Research Collaborative Bioinformatics Resource team that works with researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Mathur's responsibilities extend to analyzing high throughput biomedical “multi-omic” sequence data, advising NCI investigators on experimental design of different cancer studies, writing manuscripts, and building /maintaining open source bioinformatic analysis pipelines and workflows.
A Welder Wildlife Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Samarth earned his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Purdue University in Fall 2020, where he was enrolled in Computational Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs with specialization in Computational Life Sciences. He worked at the conservation genomics lab in Forestry and Natural Resources department under Prof. J. Andrew DeWoody. Samarth’s dissertation research focused on utilizing genome sequence data to identify genetic vulnerabilities in endangered wild species and to study how different wild populations have evolved over time. At the intersection of multiple disciplines including genetics, evolutionary biology, wildlife conservation, high-performance computing, data science, and statistics, Samarth’s doctoral research highlights the role of genomics in understanding and mitigating threats to biodiversity. During his graduate studies, Samarth was honored with many prestigious accolades, including the Most Outstanding Interdisciplinary Project Award in 2020.
Before joining Frederick National Lab, Dr. Mathur was a postdoc at the Ohio State University (2021-23) where he worked on evolutionary genomics of endangered rattlesnakes and their genetic responses to emerging infectious disease. He collaborated with multiple research labs as part of Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership (OBCP) to conduct scientific research that directly provides management planning for most at-risk species in the state of Ohio. During his career, Dr. Mathur has published many studies in high impact journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that have been widely cited and garnered scientific media attention.
Dr. Mathur’s journey from academia to a scientist at a national lab is a testimony to his interdisciplinary background, collaborative research experience, coupled with his technical proficiency. As the Closing Keynote Speaker for OIGP Spring Reception 2024, Dr. Mathur will share his insights about his professional career, research challenges, how to embrace the uncertainty of discovery, and how to take giant leaps in interdisciplinary research.
