CMCI wishes hire two postdoctoral research associates in geospatial modeling.
Position 1 will initially engage in collaborative research with the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute to use geospatial modeling of water quality and health data to predict the effects of water quality on human health.
Position 2 will be part of the recently funded NSF-EPSCoR GEM3 program, which seeks to understand how genetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity affect species response to environmental change, shaping both population response and adaptive capacity.
— 5/3/19 UPDATE: Position 2 has been filled. —
More information, including minimum requirements and application instructions, is included on this pdf and/or through Human Resources. Review of applications will begin March 1, 2019. Anticipated start date is June 1, 2019.
Congratulations to CMCI student researcher Emmanuel Ijezie who submitted one of the top 5 images to be displayed outside the College of Science Dean’s Office: Terminal Bronchiole.
Project Team: Kristopher Waynant, Darren Thompson, Tyler Siegford, Jacob Kennedy, Dharmesh Patel
Start Date: February 1, 2019
In preparation for a grant proposal to the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research, CMCI Postdoctoral Fellow Dharmesh Patel will be dedicating some of his time over the next few months to prepare models for Chemistry faculty Kristopher Waynant and Darren Thompson.
The project title is, “Exploring glycosylation dependence on the bacterial affinity of the Mucin7 repeat peptide sequence with modeled and synthesized carbon-linked amino acid conjugates.”
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death in females. Early detection of breast tumors is critical to increasing the survival of women diagnosed with this disease. This project serves as a key step to achieving the long-term goal of making accurate early detection of breast cancer available to more women at lower cost via less expensive and even portable devices. It focuses on improving existing approaches by modeling breast anatomy and implementing new deep learning architectures for breast tumor segmentation. If successful, the resulting models will accurately segment images of varying quality, collected with different imaging devices and settings. Breast ultrasound images from four medical schools will be used in this research. The success of the proposed project will improve the robustness and accuracy of tumor segmentation methodologies and will broaden the use of computer-aided diagnosis in the early detection of breast cancer in clinical practice.
Dr. Bryan Cwik, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and University Studies at Portland State University, will be speaking at CMCI’s Brown Bag Lunch on Monday, February 11, 12:30 p.m., in the Collaboratorium.
Title: Moving Beyond ‘Therapy’ and ‘Enhancement’ in the Ethics of Gene Editing
Abstract: Since the advent of recombinant DNA technology, expectations (and trepidations) about the potential for altering genes and controlling our biology at the fundamental level have been sky high. These expectations have gone largely unfulfilled. The ability to eliminate all inherited diseases, choose traits, and make ourselves stronger, faster, and smarter is not in our foreseeable future. But though the dream (or nightmare) of being able to control our biology is still far off, gene editing research has made enormous strides towards potential clinical uses in reproductive medicine. My aim in is to argue that when it comes to determining permissible uses of gene editing in one important medical context – germline intervention in reproductive medicine – issues about enhancement and eugenics are, for the foreseeable future, a red herring. Current research is taking us in a different direction, and discussions about the ethics of enhancement are of limited use in the place we appear to be headed. Arguing about the permissibility of enhancement can do little to solve the issues we’re likely to encounter there, and drawing the line of permissibility at therapeutic uses of gene editing leaves unresolved important questions that need attention if clinical use of gene editing in reproductive medicine ever becomes a possibility. Given the rapid pace of development in research on germline gene editing, these issues are in urgent need of attention by bioethicists and philosophers of medicine. And this urgency is matched by their degree of difficulty.
