Aparajitha Srinivasan placed third and Ying Wang was awarded People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 22. Srinivasan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, detailed her research on utilizing computational modeling to select the best routes to creating aroma additives. The Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division’s Wang covered how to determine which microbes eat which carbon molecules.
The Berkeley Lab SLAM, now in its fifth year, challenges early career researchers to tell the story of their research to a general audience in just three minutes. Twelve finalists are selected from entries across Lab’s Research Areas. The DOE Joint Genome Institute’s (JGI) Elle Barnes also represented the Biosciences Area this year, kicking off the SLAM with a presentation on microbial networks.
As one of the top-three finalists, Srinivasan will also represent Berkeley Lab in the second annual regional Bay Area Research SLAM on October 20, competing against the finalists from Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and SLAC National Laboratories. Jenny Onley, a Sandia-based JBEI postdoctoral scholar and Biosciences Area affiliate in the EGSB Division, placed third in the Sandia SLAM with her talk “The High Throughput Search for Enzymes that Turn Tough Plants into Biofuels.” She will be representing JBEI and her home Lab in the regional SLAM competition.
