Four UAMS postdoctoral trainees recently became the inaugural recipients of the Translational Research Institute (TRI) Health Science Innovation & Entrepreneurship (HSIE) Postdoctoral Scholars Program Awards.
Funded by TRI’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) TL1 Program, the 15-credit graduate entrepreneurship training includes a significant new partnership with the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Sam M. Walton College of Business, which will provide distance education courses to the scholars. The scholars will work with MBA student teams at the UA to develop commercialization plans for health-science technologies conceived at UAMS.
The program spans two years as a complement to the scholars’ existing mentored research training.
The scholars and their research mentors are:
- Samir Jenkins, Ph.D., (mentor, Robert Griffin, Ph.D., Department of Radiation Oncology); interests in nanomaterials and stem cell differentiation.
- Astha Malhotra, Ph.D., (mentor, Jay Mehta, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Internal Medicine, Cardiology); interests in 3-D printing and tissue regeneration.
- Melody Penning, Ph.D., (mentor, Fred Prior, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Informatics); interests in algorithms to predict adverse events in health care.
- Aaron Storey, Ph.D., (mentor, Ricky Edmondson, Ph.D., Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Cancer Institute – Proteomics); interests in mass spectrometry to identify bacteria in synovial fluid.