Graduate Students Earn Awards, Scholarships

• By Mark hendricks
• March 15, 2019

Sreedhar Reddy Suthe and Sharavan Ramachandran, Ph.D. candidates in the School of Pharmacy’s Graduate Program in Pharmaceutical Sciences (GPPS), each have been named recipients of multiple awards. The awards include the Association of Scientists of Indian Origin’s 2019 Graduate Student Award and the Dharm V. Singh Carcinogenesis Graduate Student Endowment Award, presented by the Society of Toxicology (SOT) Carcinogenesis Specialty Section.

The awards will enable Suthe and Ramachandran to attend the Society of Toxicology (SOT) 58th Annual Meeting and ToxExpo March 10-14 in Baltimore. Ramachandran, who works as a research assistant for Sanjay Srivastava, Ph.D., in the Department of Immunotherapeutics and Biotechnology, also received a first prize Student Travel Award from the SOT’s Comparative & Veterinary Specialty Section to help him attend the same meeting. 

Suthe, a research assistant for Ming-Hai Wang, M.D., Ph.D., in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, also was invited to make poster and oral presentations April 6-9 during the Experimental Biology meeting in Orlando, Florida. His presentation is titled, “RON Receptor-Targeted Antibody-Drug Conjugate Therapy Ablates Cancer Stem Cells and Induces Long-Term Tumor Regressions in Preclinical Models of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC).”

GPPS students Nehal Gupta, Ekram Chowdhury and Yoon Jung Lee also garnered awards and scholarships recently.

Gupta, a research assistant for Srivastava and the Department of Immunotherapeutics and Biotechnology, was awarded Miltenyi Biotec’s Immuno-Oncology Innovation Award to attend the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting March 29 - April 3 in Atlanta. She also was invited to give a short talk about her research during the event’s Spotlight Theater.

Chowdhury, a research assistant for Ulrich Bickel, Dr.Med., in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, was named the 2019 recipient of the Boehringer Ingelheim Award for Excellence in Biotherapeutic Safety, as selected by the SOT’s Biotechnology Specialty Section executive committee. The award seeks to encourage research and training in nonclinical safety sciences for biotherapeutic products, biodegradable plastics, biofuels, biodefense and bioremediation.

In addition, the TTUHSC Student Government Association selected Chowdhury and Lee to receive a Phonathon Scholarship, to be applied to the term in which they graduate. Phonathon scholarship recipients are chosen because of their involvement in school activities, community service, employment, demonstrated leadership ability and good academic standing.

Lee is a research assistant for James Stoll, Ph.D., in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.