Here we highlight some of the key activities and achievements of the U-RISE team over recent months.

• Dr. Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng will present How the Frog Regrows Its Eye: Developmental Insights into Ocular Regeneration  and meet U-RISE Scholars for a luncheon on November 12th!

• Six U-RISE students will be attending the SACNAS conference at the end of October.

• Luis Diego Lazo-Loya received a travel award to attend ABRCMS!

2026 Summer Research Internships for U-RISE Scholars

Makayla Grinnan

• My project, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, looked at how different microbiome exposures affect precancerous changes in the gut using a mouse model of colorectal cancer. I analyzed intestinal tissue samples to measure adenomas, which are early tumor-like lesions, and GALT, which is immune tissue in the gut.
• Dey Lab, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, Washington.

Jose Lafon

• Dendritic Spine Analysis in miR-502-3p Transgenic and Knockout Mouse Model: Relevance to Alzheimer’s disease
• Kumar Lab, Center of Emphasis in Neurosciences, Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, El Paso. Mentor: Dr. Bhupender Sharma

 Alejandro Lazo-Loya

• Identifying Microbial Predictors of Recurrent Clostridioides difficile: A Case-Control Metagenomic Study
• Brendan J. Kelly, M.D., M.S; Penn Medical    

Luis Diego Lazo Loya

• Evaluating Efficacy of Dual Selinexor and Bortezomib Across Sarcoma Models
• Graves Lab, PRIME Cancer, Duke University

Daniel Alejandro Mejia

• Tailoring and Adapting a Lung Cancer Screening Patient Navigation Intervention for Tribal Healthcare Settings
• PATCHES Lab, Fred Hutch Cancer Center SURP

Savannah Monroe​

• Investigating LPS-Induced Immune Activation in Pituitary Gonadotroph Cells
• Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Hernandez Gifford​, New Mexico State University​, Department of Animal and Range Science​

Annette Murillo           

• Restoring Native Rio Grande Cutthroat through the introduction of MYY Brown Trout.
• Field Technician for Fish, Wildlife, Conservation Ecology Department, NMSU.

Ray Rodriguez

• Prioritization of Transcriptomic Biomarkers for Distinguishing Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults from Type 2 Diabetes
• Mentor: Joann Mudge, PhD, National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR)