Aaron Horning, a graduate student in the Cancer Biology track of the Cell Systems & Anatomy graduate program and an NCI T32 trainee won the best poster award at a juried competition held at the recent 12th annual retreat of the Cancer Biology Training Consortium (CABTRAC) hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute last weekend in Pittsburgh, PA!

CABTRAC was established in 2005 to facilitate exchange of ideas between individuals and institutions dedicated to the mission of training the next generation of cancer researchers. The consortium, that currently has almost 50 member institutions, works closely with over 80 institutions within the U.S. as well as the Cancer Training Branch (CTB) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

At the retreat, there were poster presentations by trainees (pre- and postdoctoral) from several Cancer Biology training programs including those at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Stanford University, etc. The judges were Directors of Graduate Training Programs in Cancer Biology, NCI T32 Program Directors/PIs and/or Chairs of Cancer Biology departments from CABTRAC member institutions.

“The retreat was, in part,to help cancer biology training programs learn how to more effectively obtain NIH grant funding for training the next generation of cancer researchers. There were also numerous interesting talks about cutting-edge basic and translational cancer research, especially immunotherapy,” Horning said.

“It was an honor to win the “Best Poster Award.” I was really surprised when they called my name. I said something “What?? No way! Wow” when they called me. From the feedback, I got from the poster session, I think I won for a few reasons: 1) Faculty are really interested in single cell RNA-seq projects, and my project’s experimental design helped answer a different type of question they hadn’t seen before. 2) I explained it well,” he said.

UT Health San Antonio was represented at the retreat by Aaron and Dr. Kay Oyajobi, Co-Program Director for our institutional NCI T32 training grant that was recently competitively renewed for 5 years.

Congratulations also to Aaron’s mentor, Dr. Tim Huang (Molecular Medicine)!