Developmental Neurotoxicology Research Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill
Senior undergraduate student, Ruby Lapham, has been awarded Highest Honors for her senior honor’s thesis dissertation work. For her capstone presentation, she showed some of the work from her recent publication and novel RNAseq findings. Her work describes the potential transcriptomic contributions that define susceptibility or resilience to prenatal alcohol exposure and zebra fish candidate gene screening performed in a collaborator’s laboratory.
Congratulations Ruby!!
Senior undergraduate researcher, Ruby Lapham, has had her first first author manuscript accepted to the journal of Birth Defects. Congratulations Ruby!!
Lapham RL, Fish EW, Parnell SE. The 129S1/SvImJ Mouse Strain is Resistant to the Effects of Early Embryonic Alcohol and Other Sonic Hedgehog Inhibitors. 2026. Birth Defects Research. DOI: 10.1002/bdr2.70020
Kayla recently attended the Mid-Atlantic Cannabinoid Research Collaborative annual meeting in beautiful Kitty Hawk, NC. While there, she presented her research outlining the spatial distribution of the endocannabinoid system in the future brain of a neurulation-stage embryo. She was awarded the first place prize for Graduate Poster Presentation, congrats Kayla!
Dr. Dina Abu Rabe presented her research to the BCAS community. She presented her ongoing work investigating the pro-apoptotic gene, Bax, and its involvement in the progression of alcohol-induced craniofacial defects.
Kayla Richardson successfully passed her qualifying exam, officially moving on to PhD candidacy. Congrats Kayla!
Long-time post-doc and integral member of the lab, Dr. Karen Boschen, will soon be embarking on her own as she starts her new lab at SUNY Upstate Medical University.
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