The third annual Pediatric Research Day Symposium was held Wednesday at the UConn Health Center’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. The event is a joint endeavor involving UConn and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.

Dr. Stuart Orkin, the 2013 Herbert and Esther Bennett Brandwein Lecturer, presented the keynote address. Orkin is the David G. Nathan Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the chair of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His talk was titled “Reawakening Fetal Hemoglobin in the Adult: An Old Problem and New Opportunities.”

Orkin is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator as well as a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, the Dameshek Award from the American Society of Hematology, and the 2005 Distinguished Research Award of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

There were two other speakers for the event:

Dr. Nicholas Schork, professor of psychiatry at U.C. San Diego and the director of research for Scripps Genomic Medicine at Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Seminar title: “Tumor Genomic Profiling in Clinical Trials: Strategies and Issues.”

Dr. Giselle Sholler with the Center for Cancer Genomics and Quantitative Biology and head of the Laboratory of Neuroblastoma Translational Research for Van Andel Research Institute at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich. Seminar title: “Clinical Trials Using Molecular Guided Therapy in Pediatric Oncology.”

More than a dozen researchers took part in a poster presentation which was on display during the symposium.

The event was co-sponsored by the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the UConn Health Center, the Department of Research, the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, and the University of Connecticut Institute for Systems Genomics.

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