FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Truman Mathematical Biology Students Win Awards at National Meeting

Two Truman Students Tie for the Society for Mathematical Biology's Outstanding Poster Award

Two students in Truman's Mathematical Biology program tie for the Best Poster Presentation award at the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology.

Elise Walck deeply engaged in conversation at her poster.

Elise Walck and Tracey Blasingame will share the Society for Mathematical Biology's first Best Poster Presentation award for undergraduate research. Their posters tied for the award in competition with 22 other posters in the competition. Both posters communicated results obtained with teammates in Truman's "Research-focused Learning Communities in Mathematical Biology" program.

Elise Walck's poster, titled "A Cellular Potts Model of Caenorhabditis elegans Embryonic Development in the Four-Cell Stage", communicated the work of Prof. Tim Walston, Prof. Scott Thatcher, Clayton Davis and herself. Tracey Blasingame's poster, titled "The W Statistic: A New Approach for Testing the Relative Abundance Structure of Communities in a Pylogenetic Context", communicated the work of Prof. Jon Gering, Prof. Dean DeCock, Bryan Hartwig, Nathan Whelan, and herself.

This material is the result of work supported by the National Science Foundation's Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biology and Mathematics program under Grant No. 0436348, "Research-focused Learning Communities in Mathematical Biology." Information about Truman's Mathematical Biology program can be found on-line at http://mathbio.truman.edu and by contacting Prof. Jason Miller.

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