A symposium sponsored by the Graduate Student Organization of IBT will be held at the institute on Wednesday, May 16.  IBT is located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas.

The day-long symposium will feature a keynote lecture given at 11:00 a.m. by Dr. Paul W. Ewald.  He will speak on "Bird flu and other emerging diseases: How evolutionary insights help distinguish the major threats from the fizzlers.”   Dr. Ewald is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in the evolution of infectious diseases. He disagrees with the popular theory that genes alone dictate certain disease susceptibilities.

Nine graduate students studying at IBT will present papers in the afternoon session.  They are:

1:30 p.m. INVESTIGATION OF PITX2 FUNCTION IN SECONDARY PALATE DEVELOPMENT, Xiaoxia Sun.

 1:45 p.m. BBK32 FROM BORRELIA BURGDORFERI INDUCES SUPERFIBRONECTIN FORMATION, Sabitha Prabhakaran

2:00 p.m. INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLE OF THE ENTEROCOCCAL PROTEIN EF2505 IN BACTERIAL VIRULENCE, Janeu Houston

2:15 p.m. PROGRESSIVE PROSTATIC INTRAEPITHELIAL NEOPLASIA CAUSED BY COOPERATION OF ECTOPIC EPITHELIAL CELL FGFR1 WITH P53 DEPRESSION, Dongdong Cao

2:30 p.m. POTENTIAL DISSEMINATION OF BACILLUS ANTHRACIS UTILIZING LUNG EPITHELIAL CELLS, Brooke Russell

 3:00 p.m. CANONICAL WNT-SIGNALING PROMOTES BRANCHIOMERIC MUSCLE DEVELOPMENT, Jun Wang

3:15 p.m. TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR GATA-4 IS ACTIVATED BY cGMP DEPENDANT PROTEIN KINASE I, Yanlin Ma

3:30 p.m. ROLE OF FoxJ1 DURING TOOTH DEVELOPMENT, Shankar Venugopalan

 3:45 p.m. ISLET-1 EXPRESSION AND REGULATION BY PITX2 DURING TOOTH DEVELOPMENT, Chuzhi Yin

Closing the symposium will be a presentation of the Stanley Glasser Award to a member of IBT’s faculty.  For more information about the symposium, contact  the president of IBT’s Graduate Student Organization, Brooke Russell at 713-677-7590.