JOHNSON CITY – East Tennessee State University will host the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Fall Regional In-Person Conference on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 21-22.
The conference will be hosted by the university’s ASM student chapter and the Department of Health Sciences in the College of Public Health. Funding is provided by the national and Kentucky/Tennessee regional ASM organizations, as well as a grant from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). Additional sponsorship is provided by the College of Public Health and its Department of Environmental Health, the Department of Biomedical Sciences in Quillen College of Medicine, and the ETSU Center for Inflammation, Infectious Disease and Immunity.
“We are so thrilled to be hosting the Regional ASM Conference for fall 2022,” said Courtney Henley, a senior microbiology major from Jonesborough and president of the ETSU ASM chapter. “This is the first time ETSU has had the opportunity to host this conference, which will allow sharing of research, collaboration with other microbiology programs and learning about future career opportunities.
“This conference includes 15 universities from Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina. It is quite an honor for ETSU to unite the leading science and research programs in our region.”
“Our ETSU chapter of ASM applied and was selected by the ASM to host the conference. We were supposed to host the conference in 2020, but COVID changed those plans,” said Dr. Sean Fox of the Department of Health Sciences. “It is also an honor to have been awarded a grant from ORAU, which is a consortium of universities across the state,” he continued. “This grant provides funds to help promote science and research among universities in the areas of scientific research and education.”
The two-day event will feature poster sessions and oral presentations, as well as
a career expo. A Microbiology Career Panel will include representatives of careers
in industry, academia and government.
Two ASM Distinguished Speakers are scheduled to address the conference. Dr. Steve Diggle, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, and Dr. Kim Orth is a professor of molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where she is also the W.W. Caruth Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research and the Earl A. Forsythe Chair in Biomedical Science.
All events will be held at ETSU’s D.P. Culp Student Center. There is still time to register by Friday, Oct. 14. Registration is $15 per person, which includes dinner on Oct. 21 and both breakfast and lunch on Oct. 22.
For more information or registration, visit asmetsuconference.wordpress.com/.
The ETSU Department of Health Sciences, which sponsors the university’s ASM student chapter, has high rates of student placement into a variety of professional and graduate schools. According to Fox, 68% of the department’s graduates go to graduate or professional school, including medical, physician assistant and pharmacy school, while others go directly into the workforce.
For questions, contact Fox at foxsj@etsu.edu. For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at (423) 439-8346.