Kohta Ikegami, PhD, presents research to colleagues
As part of the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital Pediatric Research Day 2018, 100 trainees — seven of whom received best poster awards — presented their scholarly work at a Poster Symposium attended by Department of Pediatrics faculty.
Kohta Ikegami, PhD, winner of the Best Poster for Basic Science Research in the junior faculty category, says, “The symposium is a great opportunity to get feedback from physicians in multiple disciplines and from a broad perspective.”
Ikegami hopes his study of how the cell cycle is regulated will be helpful someday in understanding tumorigenesis. His research also examined the role of nuclear lamin A/C (LMNA), whose gene mutations cause various human diseases, including Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a child-onset premature aging disorder. A paper featuring his results has been published in bioRxiv.
Alisa McQueen, MD
The Department of Pediatrics launched the Fellows Research Symposium, a new scholarly endeavor to showcase the accomplishments of graduating senior fellows to the entire Department of Pediatrics.
“This is part of a broader initiative to cultivate a scholarly environment in all our training programs, inspire future projects with junior fellows, and spark collaborations between various sections,” says Alisa McQueen, MD, associate chair for education and director of both the Pediatric Residency Training Program and Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine.
At the first Fellows Research Symposium, 14 fellows shared the results of their studies in 15-minute presentations to faculty members and junior fellows. The projects ran the spectrum from bench science and classic lab-based research to clinical research and epidemiologic work. Sections represented included: neonatal-perinatal medicine, pediatric endocrinology, pediatric gastroenterology, infectious diseases, pediatric critical care, pediatric emergency medicine, pediatric hematology/oncology, and pediatric pulmonology.
Scholarship is fundamental to our curriculum.
Alisa McQueen, MD
“The symposium demonstrated that no matter what your career goal or scholarly area of focus, scholarship is fundamental to our curriculum at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital,” McQueen says. “We aspire to offer opportunities for all trainees to present their work in similar types of symposia.”
There is an expectation that every junior faculty member, resident and fellow will engage in some type of scholarly endeavor to enhance the rigor of scholarship across the education continuum, according to McQueen.