News & Events

Six students in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health's Department of Nutrition have won prestigious fellowships and prizes presented at the 2009 Experimental Biology Conference in New Orleans April 18-22.  The students, including Jessica Ellis, Scott Ickes, Nicole Schwerbrock (May 2009 graduate), Megan Slining, Ya Wen Teng and Natalie The, won half of the doctoral student awards and were finalists for other prizes presented by the American Society of Nutrition (ASN).

The Experimental Biology Conference is a multi-society, interdisciplinary, scientific meeting.  About 13,000 independent scientists, representing national societies of anatomists, physiologists, biochemists and molecular biologists, investigative pathologists, nutritionists and pharmacologists, register for the annual event. ASN, the premier society for nutritional sciences, is one of the societies that participates in the conference.

This year, UNC nutrition students competed nationally for ASN's most prestigious student awards and received four of the eight doctoral student awards presented:

• Nicole Schwerbrock (Cargill Fellowship)
• Megan Slining (Wrigley Research Institute Fellowship)
• Ya Wen Teng (McNeil Nutritionals Fellowship)
• Natalie The (Mars Inc. Fellowship)
  

Other UNC students awarded prizes were:

• Jessica Ellis (finalists for the ASN/Procter & Gamble Graduate Student Research Awards competition)
• Scott Ickes (finalist for the International Nutrition Council's Student Prize competition)
  

"It is a credit to our students and their mentors that we walked away from this conference with so many awards," said June Stevens, PhD, AICR/WCRF Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition. "Given that there are over 75 graduate programs in nutrition in the United States, it is incredible that we won half the doctoral student awards."

The next meeting of the Experimental Biology Conference will take place April 24-28, 2010, in Anaheim, Calif.

More information is available on the Department of Nutrition's Web pages.

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.