Presenting at my poster session!
Author: Reha Nunna | Major: Biology| Semester: Fall 2025
The Gibbs Conference on Thermodynamics was in Carbondale, IL, and this conference was packed with other researchers looking at protein structure and function as well. My mentor, post-doctoral mentor, and I wanted to go to this conference because there were many scientists studying similar processes but with different techniques, and we wanted to use this as an opportunity to have exposure on other methods and ways we could improve our project. As I attended the conference, my knowledge about proteins expanded in a way I never thought. I expected to learn a lot, but the sheer amount of techniques and hypotheses that exist within the community of science and protein work opened my eyes on changes I could make, especially in seeking help from other experts in the field. During my poster presentation, I also got a lot of help from other scientists in fixing a few issues we had in our product. I developed new connections with other scientists in similar fields, and also met scientists in other fields that gave new new ideas on how to expand the scope of our project to include upcoming technology to advance prediction models. We are currently working on purifying a section of this channel in order to study its typical structure, and we will continue to introduce expected key players in the brain to see how this conformation can change. The prediction models that we spoke with other experts about will help us with our expectations when we start to introduce the other molecules and mutations in the channel. Other experts and students also explained their purification techniques for us to consider in case it would make our process more efficient.
This conference was a different experience than I was expecting! I have seen different research conferences taking place at a large center with big auditoriums and formal clothes. This conference was quite the opposite, taking place at an outdoor education center with cabins for stay and campfires for social events. The venue was very secluded without cell service, and we had a tight schedule of events and talks. It was very refreshing to see such science and conversation take place in a casual, but passionate manner. I would recommend any student researchers with interests in bio-thermodynamic projects to attend this conference, especially if you appreciate and enjoy being outdoors.
The future of this project is to continue visualizing the structure of the Kv7.2 channel with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, then introduce other molecules to see changes in interactions. I will continue to work on this project to present for my honors thesis project in the Spring!