10 DECEMBER 2012 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG TOP: Zoe Featherstone (left) with supervisor Dr. Mags Crumlish analyzing tilapia blood smears. BOTTOM: Fabiola Lafarga scoring a gel for her EST-SSR work on red abalone. TOP: Parisa Norouzitallab (right) with advisor Dr. Peter Bossier. BOTTOM: Student Spotlight presenters (left to right) Andre Meriac, Carolina de Haro Domínguez, and Parisa Norouzitallab receiving their awards at the AQUA 2012 President’s Reception. STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Highlighting Student Scholars and Researchers The WAS Student Affairs Committee joined with the European Aquaculture Society Student Group to shine a spotlight on the best abstracts submitted by students for AQUA 2012 in Prague. Each of three students presented a three and a half minute abbreviated version of their full presentation at the wellattended plenary session. The three program co-chairs scored each presentation using the criteria for judging student poster and oral presentations and awarded the winner and the two runners-up with cash prizes. The winner of the Student Spotlight Competition was Parisa Norouzitallab, who is working towards a doctorate degree under the guidance of Dr. Peter Bossier at Ghent University. Parisa’s talk was titled “Pretreatment of Artemia franciscana with a heat shock protein inducer protects against pathogenic Vibrio campbellii.” The other two spotlight presenters were Andre Meriac from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Carolina de Haro Domínguez from Universidad de Almería in Spain. Andre’s presentation was titled “How do plant protein based diets change COD production and COD/N ratios for denitrification on internal carbon sources in RAS?” Carolina’s talk was called “Nutritive utilization and effect in fish growth and performance of Lucilia sericata meal as an alternative protein source in gilthead seabream.” Four other students were honored at the Prague meeting. The best oral presentation was awarded to Patrik Henriksson, who is studying at Leiden University in the Netherlands, for his talk titled “Towards a practical application of life cycle sustainability analysis (LCSA).” Patrik began undergraduate work in the marine biology program at Lund University in Sweden and completed a bachelor thesis under the guidance of Dr. Jeff Richard at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. At the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, he was introduced to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which is a diverse framework for assessing environmental interactions and more commonly recognized by its downsized version, carbon footprinting. His work with LCA modeling has continued with his Ph.D. research at Leiden University, where he is advised by Dr. Jeroen Guinée. The runner-up for best oral presentation was Hyungtaek Jung for his talk titled “Identification of candidate genes and SNPS from 454 GS-FLX transcriptome data and their correlation with individual growth performance in giant freshwater prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii.” He is currently in the final year of his Ph.D. program at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Jung’s research interests focus on identification and characterization of candidate genes that influence growth traits in aquatic organisms using NGST approaches. Specifically, he uses RNA-Seq approaches to understand gene function, structure and genetic effects on expressed quantitative trait loci. His research group isolates and identifies SNP markers in growth-related putative genes as potential markers for improving growth performance in improved culture lines. Because little is known currently about (CONTINUED ON PAGE 9) TOP: Patrik Hennriksson (left) reviewing work with his supervisor, Dr. Jeroen Guinée. BOTTOM: Hyungtaek Jung proudly displaying his lab’s next generation sequencing equipment.
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