BIOLOGY SENIOR COMPS
PRESENTATIONS
Fall 2021
Please reach out to oasin@oxy.edu for Zoom details.
1:30-2:15 JESS THOMPSON
Bullseye! Targeting Mosquitoes to Control the Spread of Malaria
2:15-3:00 ELIZA KIRSCH
I am currently an independent postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara. I recently finished my Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Davis and received my PhD from the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley in May 2019. Broadly, I study global change impacts in terrestrial plant communities. I combine novel methodological approaches with long-term observational and experimental data to disentangle the complex, interacting, and often nonlinear relationships between plant communities and global change drivers, including pests, pathogens, drought, and fire.
Neha Savant (she/her) is a Wildlife & Fisheries Ecologist with New York City's Parks & Recreation Department, and a consultant on equity and culture. She is committed to working towards multi-species coexistence in cities from both a scientific and cultural lens. Neha's seminar talk will be a collection of stories about the values within her work, her career path through academic, nonprofit and government sectors, and some examples of her efforts to integrate the wildlife perspective into infrastructure planning.
Yohualli B. Anaya M.D., M.P.H. is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is a graduate of Occidental College, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Biology. She received her medical degree and Master of Public Health from the USC Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Anaya is a faculty expert for the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative and collaborates on research with the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture. Dr.
Oxy alumni (Lauren Chin '20; Ian McConell '20; Allen Li '20) will share their personal stories and advice on how to score 520+ on the MCAT exam. Students can register for this event on Handshake.
Join us for a virtual session and learn more about Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine and gain insight through some admissions case studies. Students can register for this event on Handshake.
Seasonal influenza results in 3 to 5 million cases of severe disease and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths annually. The emergence of more pathogenic, highly transmissible pandemic strains or zoonotic avian strains is also a serious concern. Understanding how immune cells promote or resolve lung damage may identify new and specific cellular targets for intervention. Immune cells called macrophages have been implicated in both the resolution and the progression of influenza, but the drivers of these outcomes are poorly understood.
Join President Elam as he welcomes Broderick Johnson, chair of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance Advisory Council and current EVP, Public Policy & EVP, Digital Equity for Comcast Corporation. They will discuss mentorship, equity and justice, and the digital divide.
The paradigms of treating bacterial infections were established based on fairly arbitrary clinical decisions early in the clinical antibiotic era of the 1940's and 1950's. Treatment durations and the use of single antibiotics were decided upon a much different host profile of patients than the contemporary patient population. Today's antibiotic-receiving patients are older, have more medical problems, are immunocompromised, and may even have infected biomedical devices (prosthetic joints, pacemakers, mechanical valves) that did not exist 80 years ago.
In this presentation, I will discuss innovative and community-centric care models that our team has implemented, with the goal of ensuring optimal access to essential medications and healthcare services for chronic disease management in western Kenya. I will also share personal lessons learned from my global health work over the past decade. Lastly, I hope to discuss how these learned lessons can be adapted to solving healthcare challenges in our local communities.
Please reach out to oasin@oxy.edu for Zoom information.