Cocktail honored

On Oct. 8, UNC-Charlotte hosted the 8th Annual Charlotte Biotechnology Conference, which brought 20 speakers and 350 biotech professionals together to discuss business-university partnerships, progress at the N.C. Research campus and dozens of recent technical advances. To generate student interest in biotechnology research, the conference conducted a graduate student poster competition with cash prizes. One of the six finalists was an SAES student, Olcay Boyacioglu, who presented a poster covering a research project guided by Dr. Ipek Goktepe, an SAES food scientist. Boyacioglu’s research was into “Biocontrol of E. coli O157:H7 in harvested spinach using bacteriophage cocktails.” Charlotte radio station WFAE still has interviews available with two of the students who entered the research competition. and video footage of the keynote address by Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton is available on the conference website. Boyacioglu also presented these research findings at the NC OPT-ED (North Carolina Alliance to Create Opportunity Through Education) Alliance Day in early October. The SAES was also represented at NC OPT-ED Alliance Day by one of Goktepe’s undergraduate students in the Food and Nutritional Sciences Program, Jasmine Brooks, whose poster presentation covered an “Evaluation of Antibacterial Activity of Select Plant Essential Oils.”