Nyack College Department of Biology and Chemistry Chair Dr. Jacqueline Washington along with her biology students–Angela DeJesus, Erin O’Brien and Brendan Buehler–participated in the 54th Annual Metropolitan Association of Colleges and Universities Biologist (MACUB) conference hosted by Queensborough Community College. Forty-three colleges in the New York Tri-State area were represented and nearly 100 students made presentations at the virtual event. Dr. Washington served as a judge.
The Nyack seniors presented their research on, “MuffinTheCat, Badulia, and DesireeRose Bacteriophages: Novel Members of the Tectiviridae Family.” Their abstract will be published in an upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal In Vivo.
Columbia University professor Dr. Martin Chalfie was a keynote speaker. His address was on “The Continuing Need for Useless Knowledge,” which addressed how accidental discoveries and individual findings over hundreds of years have collectively shaped modern science. He pointed out that the iPhone was built using the knowledge and research of thousands of individuals from as far back as the 1700s. Dr. Chalfie won a 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien “for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.”