MBB student wins poster award at Georgia Life Sciences Summit
By: Geetha Parachuru
University of Georgia student Michael Supe was recently announced as one of the poster award winners at the 12th annual Georgia Life Sciences Summit, the Southeast regions’ largest bioscience conference.
Supe, in the Master of Biomanufacturing and Bioprocessing (MBB) program in UGA’s Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute, is the first in his program to receive this prestigious award.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better representative of the MBB program to have won this award,” said Joy Peterson, associate professor in microbiology and director of the MBB program, now in its third year.
Supe earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with a concentration in cellular molecular biology before traveling to the Philippines to pursue marine biology research. However, he quickly changed gears and found himself working in a pathology lab.
“When I came back (to the US), I said, well that’s kind of what I need to do,” he commented.
Shortly after, Supe began working at a biotechnology company, Nanologix, developing rapid detection quick-test assays that are utilized by several organizations including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.After exploring other employment opportunities, Supe enrolled at UGA.
“I chose UGA’s MBB program because I didn’t want to do a traditional thesis-based Master’s or PhD. I didn’t want to work in just academia or do purely research,” he said.
“My favorite things about this program are all the industrial training and applications that we learn,” he said. “For some people, doing your Master’s or PhD requires focusing on one specific area, whereas with this program you are exposed to a bigger picture.”
When it came time to select a lab rotation Supe knew what he wanted: an opportunity to work with Ralph Tripp, Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar and Georgia Alliance Chair of Animal Health Vaccine Development.
“I told Dr. Peterson, I really want to work in this lab. I’ll do anything it takes to get that cell culture and vaccine development experience,” said Supe.
Under the mentorship of Patricia Jorquera, a postdoctoral research associate in Tripp’s lab, this opportunity manifested into a winning poster on Respiratory Syncytial Virus research. The poster topic focused on microparticle vaccine development for the RSV virus.
“The interesting thing about the RSV virus is that it can modulate the immune response; it can change your body’s immune response to a different immune path,” explained Supe.
His research involves testing a microparticle vaccine in mice models to understand these different responses.
“I only presented about five percent of the research I did, and I was told by Dr. Jorquera to keep it simple and focused, with lots of pictures and to avoid over-wording it,” he said.
“For any research project, you should be able to tell a really good story,” said Supe. “The background, what is the problem, what is the approach to solve it, how is that research going to solve that problem, and what are the potential next steps?”