Summer Student Seminar Series

Welcome to the NCI at Frederick and Fort Detrick Summer Student Seminar Series. This program allows summer interns to meet one another and hear about the broad range of research being carried out on the Frederick campus.

All seminars will be held in Building 549 Auditorium on Tuesdays from Noon - 1:00pm. Please give your mentors a copy of the dates and inform them on the day of that you will be attending.

Summer Students are required to take the NCI at Frederick Scientific Ethics Training. All students who have already taken this training should take the NCI Student Ethics Refresher Course. For additional information on Ethics policies, please refer to the NIH Ethics Website.

2017 Speakers

Date Speaker Title Details
June 20 Dr. Frank Maldarelli - NCI HIVDRP/HVIB “Mechanisms of HIV Persistence During Antiretroviral Therapy: Concepts and Controversies
June 27 Dr. Elizabeth Rogers - USDA “Rathayibacter toxicus: how a bacterium hitches a ride on a nematode to invade grass seeds and produce a toxin harmful to livestock” Rathayibacter toxicus is a USDA-APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) listed Select Agent because it produces a powerful toxin. To date, it has only been found in Australia, where it causes annual ryegrass toxicity in grazing livestock. Because it has the potential to cause serious damage to U.S. agriculture, we have been developing methods of detecting R. toxicus and investigating the basic biology of this and related bacteria.

Recommended Reading:

RathayibacterPoisoning_March2015.pdf
July 4 NO SEMINAR
July 11 Dr. Gene Olinger - MRIGlobal-Global Health Surveillance and Diagnostics “Standing on the shoulders of giants: development of a passive immune therapy for Ebola” This presentation is about the development of the “secret serum” used in the 2014-2015 Ebola Virus outbreak in Western Africa with a focus on the basic, applied research involved in the development of ZMapp. A brief history links the work to the first Nobel Prize in Medicine, and a series of notable science achievements that led to a collaborative innovation that was destined for scientific obscurity until the unfortunate Ebola Virus outbreak.

Recommended Reading:

  1. PNAS-2011-Zeitlin-20690-4.pdf;
  2. 199ra113.ful.pdf;
  3. Inside the Ebola Wars;
  4. PNAS_2012-Olinger18030-5.pdf
July 18 Dr. John Brognard – NCI/CCR/Signaling Networks in Cancer Section "The quest to develop new cancer therapies for understudied cancers" Personalized precision medicines and immunotherapies are improving outcomes and quality of life for many forms of cancer. However, for some cancers these types of therapies have not been developed due to lack of understanding of the genetic drivers of the disease. My lab focuses on understanding the drivers of cancers of unmet need to aid in ushering in the next generation of targeted therapeutics that will improve outcome and quality of life for the patient.


Recommended Reading:

  1. Fawdar S, Edward ZC, Brognard J. Druggable Drivers of Lung Cancer. Oncotarget. Aug 14, 2013.
  2. Fawdar S, Trotter EW*, Li Y*, Stephenson NL, Hanke F, Marusiak AA, Edwards ZC, Ientile S, Waszkowycz B, Miller CJ, Brognard J. Targeted Genetic Dependency Screen Facilitates Efficient Identification of Gain-of-Function Mutations in FGFR4, PAK5, and MAP3K9 in Lung Cancer. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, July 23, 2013 Pgs: 12426-31
  3. Testoni E, Stephenson NL, Torres-Ayuso P, Marusiak AA, Trotter EW, Hudson A, Hodgkinson CL, Morrow CJ, Dive C, Brognard J. Somatically mutated ABL1 is an actionable and essential NSCLC survival gene. EMBO Mol Med. Jan 12, 2016; 8(2):105-16.
July 25 Dr. James Hartley “There are many ways to make important contributions to science." Raw academic talent and intelligence are important, but so are personality, integrity, and imagination. I will illustrate these points as one with marginal skills in some areas, but also blessed with good luck and an interest in engineering DNA tools.”

Recommended Reading:
  1. Single Synonymous Mutations in KRAS Cause Transformed Phenotypes in NIH3T3 Cells Waters AM, Bagni R, Portugal F, Hartley JL. PLoS One. 2016 Sep 29;11(9):e0163272. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0163272. eCollection 2016. PubMed PMID: 27684555; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5042562.
  2. DNA cloning using in vitro site-specific recombination Hartley JL, Temple GF, Brasch MA. Genome Res. 2000 Nov;10(11):1788-95. PubMed PMID: 11076863; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC310948.
  3. “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself” Sean B. Carroll, theoretical physicist
August 8 Dr. Nadya Tarasova “A winding road to cancer cures: recalculating the route as we go.” The lecture will describe the multi-disciplinary nature of drug discovery. It will also reflect on the many career passes that can lead to the same goal.

Recommended reading:
  1. Peter Doherty “The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: Advice for Young Scientists” (a book, Columbia University Press, 2008)
  2. Adam Grant “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success” Penguin Books, 2014
  3. Where is the Future of Drug Discovery for Cancer? http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S00928674(17)30122-8.pdg
August 15 Matt Holderfield – Cancer Research Technology Program (CRTP), RAS Drug Discovery Group, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) "Doing cancer research in academia, industry, and somewhere in between.” RAS (RAt Sarcoma) proteins contribute to many advanced-stage human cancers. Despite many years of active research and drug development efforts, no effective therapies exist for the treatment of RAS-driven tumors at this point. The Frederick National Laboratory's CRTP is concurrently working with partners from academia, industry, and Government to improve our understanding of RAS' oncogenic functions and to identify more effective targets for inhibiting RAS-mediated cellular processes. The goal of the Drug Discovery group at FNLCR is to develop assays that will measure aspects of RAS biology upon which human cancer cells depend. These assays comprise both phenotypic (i.e., cell-based) and molecular (in vitro) screens.

Recommended Reading:

  1. Dragging Ras Back in the Ring
  2. RAS Target Identification at FNLCR

This seminar series is sponsored by the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR). The NICBR includes the following agencies National Cancer Institute at Frederick (NCI-F), United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), US Department of Agriculture Foreign Disease Weed Science Research Unit (USDA FDWSRU), US Department of Homeland Security National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (DHS NBACC), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Integrated Research Facility (NIAID IRF), and the Navy Medical Biodefense Research Lab (NMBDRL). The series is open to all NICBR students and employees. Students from outside the Frederick National Lab and Ft. Detrick communities are also welcome.