Last Friday, the College of Veterinary Medicine hosted the 17th annual Biomedical and Biological Sciences (BBS) Symposium, organized by students and postdoctoral fellows associated with the BBS Graduate Program. This year's symposium was themed "Translating Basic Research into Biomedical Innovation" and highlighted the importance of discovery research, essential for the eventual improvements in diagnostic, treatment and management of animal and human health and disease.

Heinz Feldman, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the disease modeling and transmission section at the National Institutes of Health, gave the keynote lecture, entitled "Emerging viruses - From disease modeling to intervention." Feldman's virology lab studies emerging and re-emerging viral pathogens, in particular those that cause hemorrhagic fever, with an aim of developing diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. His specific focus is to understand the lifecycle of certain viral pathogens that are likely to cause serious or lethal human diseases for which preventive or therapeutic interventions are not available.

The symposium also gave awards in several categories:

• Robert Swanda, Student Talk Award
• Ellie Larson and Cybelle Tabilas, Student Poster Awards
• Gat Rauner, Post-Doc Talk Award

This year's organizing committee members were Lauren Choate, Esteban Flores Cortes, Simon Frueh, Furkat Mukhtarov, Mridusmita Saikia, Ian Voorhees and Lauren Webb. The symposium was sponsored by the Cornell Biomedical & Biological Sciences Graduate Program, the Baker Institute for Animal Health, the Cornell BEST Program and LPS.