Alison Hege (PhD, Curriculum in Toxicology) and Pamela Ross (MSPH, Rusyn Advisor) received first and third, respectively, place awards in the graduate student poster competition held at the North Carolina chapter of the Society of Toxicology 2008 Spring Meeting.  Students from UNC, NC State University and Duke University presented their work at the meeting.  Hege presented a poster entitled “Phenotypic anchoring of gene expression data from acetaminophen hepatotoxicity studies in the mouse model of the human population reveals biomarkers of response.”  Her work shows that changes in gene expression in liver, when correlated with an observed toxicity in a large panel of inbred mouse strains, reveal biomarkers of effect that may be more reflective of population-wide responses to toxic insults.  Ross presented a poster entitled "Time-course comparison of xenobiotic activators of CAR and PPAR-alpha."  This work establishes common fingerprints of exposure to activators of CAR and PPAR-alpha in rodent liver and demonstrates what changes correlate with the presence or absence of a corresponding nuclear receptor.