The 11th KSEA West Gulf Coast Regional Conference (WGCRC) – 14th Korean-American Bio-Medical Scientists Symposium (KABMS) was held on Saturday, December 12th, 2020. This event was jointly organized by KSEA Arkansas (CP: Hyunju Jeong, PhD), KSEA North Texas (CP: Wooram Park, PhD), KSEA Texas Coastal Bend (CP: Soojin Yoo, PhD), KSEA Austin Texas (CP: In Hyouk Song, PhD), and KSEA South Texas (CP: Goo Jun, PhD) Chapters. The lead organizers were the conference chair, Dr. Min Gyu Lee, Associate Professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (UT MD Anderson) and Dr. Goo Jun, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Due to the Covid-19 pandemic situation, the conference was held online via Zoom meetings. The meeting was a huge success with more than 100 people registered and participated, including a keynote speaker, three invited speakers, thirteen oral presenters, and Korean-American faculty members and trainees across the region. The regional conference was supported by KSEA and Consulate Generate of Korea in Houston.
The theme of this year’s WGCRC was “Experiencing and Visioning Innovative Research.” The conference started at 1pm Central Time, with opening remarks from Mr. Myung Soo Ahn, Consul General of the Republic of Korea in Houston, and Dr. Soolyeon Cho, President of KSEA.
The first session was a plenary lecture session, chaired by Dr. Kyuson Yun (Houston Methodist/Weill Cornell Medical College). Dr. Susan L. Ackerman, the Steven W. Kuffler Chair of Biology and professor at University of California, San Diego and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator presented a wonderful scientific talk titled “mRNA translation defects and neurological disorders,” explaining her lifelong research on neuroscience and genetics.
The second session was the oral presentation session chaired by Dr. Ju-seog Lee (MD Anderson), replacing the poster sessions of previous years due to the online setup. The oral presentation session was organized to improve the career development of young scientists and professionals by providing them presentation opportunities and awards. A total of thirteen young researchers including graduate students and post-doctoral researchers presented their original research and were judged by faculties and senior researchers based on their research presentation. We organized two break-out presentation sessions based on the research topics. In biological sciences session, Mijeong Kim, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, was awarded the best presentation award by presenting “Gata3 initiates differentiation of embryonic stem cells to primitive endoderm- and trophectoderm-like cells.” In quantitative biomedical sciences and engineering session, Shinhye Chung, a graduate student at the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) at Houston, was awarded the best presentation award by presenting “Metabolomic profiles associated with glucose intolerance traits among Mexican Americans in Starr County, Texas.” Second place presentation awards were awarded to: Jinna Yoon (Univ. Texas Rio Grande Valley), Joo-Hyung Lee (UTHealth), Youngdoo Kim (BCM, Baylor College of Medicine), Wonseok Lee (BCM), Jongmin Choi (BCM), Ji Chul Nam (Texas State Univ), Seunghyun Jung (Univ. Arkansas), Eiru Kim (UT MD Anderson), Woolim Hong (Texas A&M Univ), Seunghwan Lee (Rice Univ), Seunghwan Baek (Texas A&M Univ).
The third session was an invited talks session, chaired by Dr. Joo-hyung Lee (UTHealth). We had three invited speakers this year, including two career development talks and one scientific talk. The first speaker, Dr. Shrenik Mehta, Scientist at Pharmaceutical Development Department, Genentech, explained the difference between academia and industry and guidance in career transition to the pharmaceutical industry. The next speaker, Dr. JongKyeong Cheong, Professor at Seoul National University, gave a talk titled “Overview of the SNU faculty recruitment,” and explained the general faculty recruitment process of research-oriented universities of Korea with his personal experiences as faculty recruitment chair for many years. Dr. Cheong has joined the conference directly from Korea, which was an unusual luxury we had this year due to the online conference format. The third speaker, Dr. Se-Ran Jun, Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, explained her research program in monitoring outbreak of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections with a talk titled “(A real-time) genomic surveillance for infection control and antibiotic stewardship.” After the invited talk session, all the participants celebrated the success of the first ever online WGCRC-KABMS event. Awards for best and second place oral presenters were also given before the closing remark.
At the 2020 KSEA WGCRC-KABMS, we achieved these goals: 1) enhancing greater scientific and professional network and interaction between all KSEA members in vast Texas and Southwest area, 2) providing broad opportunity and information to young Korean American scientists and engineers for their career development and network with established scientists and engineers, and 3) making the meeting place for the all Korean-American scientists and engineers from different institutions across West Gulf Coast area to set up new collaboration between KSEA members. The more detailed information regarding KSEA West Gulf Coast Regional Conference is available at the WGCRC website (https://wgcrc.ksea-st.org/).
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