Environmental Science Students Win Poster Presentation Awards

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Media contact: Tonya B. Lewis, (254) 710-4656
WACO, Texas (Feb. 14, 2014) - At the recent Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) meeting in Nashville, Baylor doctoral student Elias Oziolor and undergraduate student David Dreier won first place poster presentation awards for best Ph.D. and undergraduate research presentations, respectively.
Bryan Brooks, Ph.D., director of the environmental science graduate program and the environmental health science program, "couldn't be prouder" of the students' accomplishments, he said.

"We enthusiastically celebrate with Elias and David for their well-deserved success," Brooks said. "For an undergraduate student and a Ph.D. student from the same university to win these highly competitive awards at an international meeting is exceptionally rare."

Brooks said the students' accomplishments are a reflection of the department's forward-looking strategy.

"Facilitating substantive opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research in the health sciences represents a strategic goal of faculty in the environmental science department," he said.

Oziolor, who is in his second year of doctoral studies, presented "Evolved Resistance to Contaminant-Induced Cardiac Teratogenesis in Gulf Killifish Fundulus grandis Populations from the Houston Ship Channel."

"This topic is a combination of my advisor's and my own interests in evolutionary toxicology," Oziolor said. "I am in this field because it fascinates me that we often overlook the ways we affect the environment with the toxic materials that we dispose of and I would like to explore new ways of understanding the changes we make."

"I was definitely surprised [by my success]," Oziolor said. "Even though I had put good effort into my poster, at a conference of that size it is very difficult to get noticed, so I had no big expectations after seeing the number of posters there. It took a couple of minutes for it to sink in."

The SETAC is a not-for-profit, global professional organization composed of more than 6,000 individual members and institutions from academia, business and government. Since 1979, the society has provided a forum in which scientists, managers and other professionals exchange information and ideas on the study, analysis and solution of environmental problems, the management and regulation of natural resources, research and development, and environmental education.
by Kristen Bennett, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805.
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