On October 29th, 2018 Jia, Sierra, and David traveled to the NCSU campus to take part in the Comparative Medicine Institute (CMI) Functional Tissue Engineering Seed Grant Competition or CMIFTESGC for short. The CMIFTESGC is an event where new projects are proposed, preferencing studies of high risk and high reward, and additionally incentivizing collaborative research between professors. Faculty from NCSU, Chapel Hill, and Duke attended the event. During the event there were a total of 5 groups competing for 2-3 $15,000 grants.
The Esposito group was the only student group in the competition, which came as quite a surprise to them. Even so, the Esposito group was relatively unaffected by this development and adapted easily. Both Sierra Bonney and David Raines proposed a study on ‘The Effects of Brassinosteroids on Skeletal Muscle Mass in an Equine Model.’ Other groups proposed studies on topics such as ACL aplasia, cardiac stem cells, and biomechanical joints, just to name a few.
Even though the Esposito group did not manage to secure grant funding; they gained valuable presentation experience, insight into cutting edge research/proposals, and formed new relationships with professors in the biomedical field. In the future we hope to propose more studies and collaborate with the members of CMI.