Valeria Velásquez-Zapata received a $1500 competitive travel award to attend the IS-MPMI Congress in Glasgow, Scotland July 14-18.  Awardees participated in a public communication and outreach workshop to enable them to develop skills to communicate their research to a broader audience, which will impact public understanding of MPMI research.  

At the workshop they worked in small groups to develop a two minute “elevator talk” to describe their research in a manner that will be understandable to an educated non-scientist.  These then will be published on the Interactions website or an IS-MPMI YouTube channel. She also presented a poster entitled “Modeling effector-host interactions in the context of the barley protein interactome” (authors: Valeria Velásquez-Zapata; Sagnik Banerjee; Priyanka Surana; J. Mitch Elmore; Roger Wise) under the session:  Systems biology and modelling plant-microbe interactions. (picture attached)

Subsequent to the IS-MPMI congress, Valeria traveled to Basel, Switzerland to attend the 27^th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) where she also presented her poster.