Hello miRcorers!

The annual Genes and Health contest will be held on January 26th, 2019 for this school year! Please spread the word to your GIDAS clubs and anyone that may be interested. There is no fee to participate and is a very good bonding experience!

There will also be a talent show, so please sign up with the talent you will be performing! Collaborations with other members are welcome as well!

Here is a link to a google drive folder full of helpful study materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mJWUrFqABBBZhd4Mp1plQGG22cOF1YHk?usp=sharing

Our disease of interest is pancreatic cancer, so make sure you study the correct topics! See you at the next meeting!

Hi miRcorers!

For this week’s meeting, Dr. Lee traveled all the way to San Diego so she could have an in person meeting with all the members in the San Diego location! All the other members met through the online video call. We had two student presenters today.

DNA groups have been finalized! If you do not have a group, please contact Karthik Ravi. New groups met today after the presentations.

Hi miRcorers!

Dr. Marina Pasca Di Magliano, Ph.D., Associate Professor of General Surgery of the University of Michigan, came and gave us an informative talk for our fifth meeting. Temporary groups then split up and finished up their advocacy materials.

Final groups for DNA and RNA divisions are being finalized. A document will be sent out when those groups are created, so please watch out for it so you know who to work with!

Hi miRcorers!

This week Dr. Howard Crawford, Ph.D. Professor of the UM Med School and Director of Pancreatic Cancer Research Program, came and gave us an informative and interesting talk about pancreatic cancer and the research he has done with it. Afterwards, everyone split up into their groups to finish their advocacy materials they started last week.

Most of the committees met again after the general meeting. If you still have any interest of joining a committee, please contact the committee head!

See you all soon!

Hi miRcorers!

Today, Dr. Lee introduced the GDC Data Portal from the National Cancer Institute (NIH) to everyone which we used to find important data for different types of pancreatic cancer, like survival rate and significant genes. It is a very good resource to use for our research. The NIH also has a page on their website about pancreatic cancer and common cancer statistics (https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/), which is another very good informational resource to compare pancreatic cancer with other cancers. We had a short icebreaker to help everyone learn more names.

We resumed research in the temporary groups from last week and began thinking of ideas to spread awareness for pancreatic cancer. Examples include making posters, infographics, t-shirts, etc. Please finish those awareness materials at home for the next meeting if you didn’t already finish. Once you are done, you can upload those materials with your group names into the “Final advocate product for Pancreatic cancer Research” folder.

We also had committee meetings today after the general meeting. For those that are interested in joining a committee, you can “shadow” a meeting so that you can get the idea of what the committee does and which one you would be most interested in. Please contact the committee leader you interested in if you have any interest in joining!

See you all next week!

Hi miRcorers!

We had the first official miRcore meeting of 2019 today. Thank you to all the students and parents for coming!

We went over the values and goals of miRcore and started introducing everyone through a few short games of two truths and a lie. As the students got to know each other, Dr. Lee had a separate meeting with all the parents. As a group, Dr. Lee went over our main goal of changing the world through democratizing medicine. Our disease  of focus for this year is pancreatic cancer. Students who attended the meeting began researching general information about pancreatic cancer in temporary research groups.

For all GIDAS leaders: Eleanor Lin will be leading an informational GIDAS workshop through an online video call meeting. If you would like to be a part of this, please respond to the poll so that she can decide what date to hold the workshop. Here is the link: https://goo.gl/forms/Rpbb8ilesNU4GAsm2

Thank you once again for your participation and commitment!