By Sarah Wang | Staff Writer
With an aim to promote research and professional development, the Baylor Biology Graduate Student Society will be closing its submissions on April 12 for its CEGSS Biology Symposium, which is being hosted from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on April 24 in Cashion 506.
According to their website, the letters CEGSS stand for the two unique groups of research in the biology department: Cellular, Molecular, Health and Disease (CMHD) and Environment, Ecology and Organismal (EEO). Combined, these two tracks constitute the name CEGSS or CMHD/EEO Graduate Student Society.
The CEGSS symposium is designed to promote professional development by providing a forum for biology graduate students and faculty. In this reunion, attendees are able to showcase their research for one another while also offering opportunities to practice presentation and networking skills, the symposium website says.
Since 2018, the symposium is intended to be hosted every spring but stopped for three years due to the pandemic. According to graduate assistant and CEGSS President Haleigh Parker, the society is the first group of students to bring the symposium back since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If this symposium goes well, we will be expanding this to more departments to eventually encompass hopefully most of the STEM fields,” Parker said. “We’re interconnected to display that and showcase some of the diversity in research in our department.”
Parker said one of the main goals for this symposium is to encourage interdepartmental research at Baylor.
“We want to prove that the department can come together and host something of this nature,” Parker said. “We really want to spread out to the other fields like chemistry, physics and geosciences. There’s really nothing established that allows us to do that.”
Graduate assistant and CEGSS Recruitment Chair Malcolm Macleod said the group wanted to use the symposium as an opportunity to bring people together.
“This department is incredibly diverse, not just in the people, but also in what people are studying,” Macleod said. “Sometimes it can be a little separated, so we want to bring people together from a lot of different disciplines within biology and have undergraduate, graduate students and faculties all coming together.”
According to Parker, this year’s biology symposium will be bigger than previous years since they had not included faculty or undergraduates.
The “rule-kicker,” Parker said, is to get graduate students exposed to the specific researches and studies going on within the department. It is also aiming to expose undergraduate students to different types of research and why research matters.
The symposium will include presentations and talks on completed and in-progress research as well as research ideas. Any undergraduate currently conducting research and any graduate student with a poster or presentation, are encouraged to apply to the sessions by submitting an abstract using the QR code before April 12.
Graduate Assistant Kayla Haberman, CEGSS secretary, said they want to bring exposure to the variety of research they have going on in the biology department.
“We want to expose everybody to different equipment we use and is available today with technology,” Haberman said.
Graduate assistant and Recruitment Chair Charli Worth said the symposium is a really good opportunity for students to expand their horizons and knowledge of their future careers.
“This is a good opportunity not just for people who are in research or interested in research, but for people who are in the sciences because it lets them see the variety of jobs or applications that science can go,” Worth said.
