Five doctoral students and one staff member in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Human Toxicology received research awards at the annual meeting of the Central States Regional Chapter of the Society of Toxicology (CS-SOT) on Oct. 8-9 in Kansas City, KS.

Staff member Susanne Flor (Gabriele Ludewig lab) and Gopi Gadupudi (Larry Robertson lab) received awards for best post-doc/staff and student oral presentations, respectively. 

Claire Doskey (Gary Buettner lab), Mengshi Li (Michael Schultz lab), Marisa Salomon Beltran (Gabriele Ludewig lab), and Aditya Stanam (Andrean Simons-Burnett lab) each were honored with best student poster awards. 

Larry Robertson, director of the UI Human Toxicology Program, was the invited speaker at the opening dinner on Oct. 8. His talk, “PCBs: New Knowledge Gained from Old Pollutants,” provided an overview about the history of production, environmental contamination, and federal regulation of PCBs. Robertson also gave an update about ongoing research in the Iowa Superfund Research Program, with special emphasis on indoor and outdoor air and human blood contamination in residents of East Chicago, Indiana, new discoveries of PCBs as an inadvertent byproduct in current consumer products, and recent classification of PCBs by the World Health Organization as a class 1 human carcinogen.

The CS-SOT is the regional chapter of the Society of Toxicology, with members from Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Iowa. This year’s meeting had about 100 participants.