With the continuing mission of providing significant educational opportunities to the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) membership, the Education Committee (EdComm) has a proud heritage of overseeing the Waters Research Poster Competition for the annual meeting. The competition is open to all and includes scientific reports from academia, as well as cutting-edge research from core facilities and corporate R&D groups. The goal of offering the awards is to elicit the highest level of information on techniques, applications, and technologies and share knowledge pertinent to further excellence in core facility services.
The process for judging the poster submissions begins with the author submitting an abstract on-line during the registration procedure. The author chooses a submission category and self-selects whether to be considered for competition.
Each abstract is reviewed by at least three members of the EdComm, based on the following criteria adapted from the Annual BioMedical Research Conference for Minority Students: development of a hypothesis or statement of the problem, description of methods and controls, clarity in the presentation of results, a conclusion that summarizes the results, and impact of the results to the core facility mission. The entire committee comes to a consensus as to the semifinalists. All semifinalists must agree to give a short oral presentation during the poster review session for the EdComm and to give a 15-min talk at a regular meeting session if they are a winner.
During the annual meeting, teams of EdComm members circulate through the poster session and evaluate the semifinalist presentations. The metrics used for evaluating abstracts also contain information about how to judge (rank) each of three additional aspects determined during the designated poster presentation: clarity of the poster presentation, originality and contribution to the core facility, and oral presentation. Four finalists are ultimately selected.
Competition has provided the ABRF membership with excellent posters to enjoy during the annual meeting. The presentation by finalists during the annual meeting is an opportunity to obtain further information about the science behind the poster.
We are fortunate to provide ABRF attendees with this opportunity and thank Waters Corporation for continuing its support of this award by providing a monetary honorarium to the winners.
The EdComm proudly congratulates the winners of the ABRF 2012 Waters Best Poster Award:
Alexandre Campos
ProteoRed Multicenter Experiment for Long-term Quality Control Evaluation of Proteomics Core Facilities
Proteomics Core Facility, Barcelona Science Park, Barcelona, Spain
Toumy Guettouche
An Improved Workflow for miRNA Expression Profiling Using Ion Semiconductor Sequencing
Hussman Institute for Human Genomics and Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL, USA
Zhenjiu Liu
Redox Protein Characterization and Quantification Using ICAT/Itraq-MS to Investigate Thiol-Based Regulatory Mechanisms Induced by Oxidative Stress in Plants
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, MO, USA
Peter Tonner
Transcriptomic Profiling of Ribosomal Protein Pseudogenes in Diverse Human Tissuesy
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
Contributor Information
Katia Sol-Church, AI duPont Hospital for Children.
Kevin L. Knudtson, The University of Iowa
Elke Kuster-Schock, McGill University, Cell Imaging and Analysis Network.
LeRoy Martin, Waters Corp..
Janet M. Murray, The University of Vermont.
David S. Needleman, U.S. Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service Eastern Regional Research Center
Brian C. Searle, Proteome Software Inc.
James Van Ee, Cornell University.
Michael Zianni, Plant-Microbe Genomics Facility/The Ohio State University.
Karen R. Jonscher, University of Colorado Denver.