Congratulations to UF DMD student Yandy Gonzalez Marrero who won first place in the 2016 DENTSPLY/Caulk Competition in the Clinical Science category for his research project, “Local and Plasma Inflammatory Biomarkers in Localized Aggressive Periodontitis” during the American Association of Dental Researchers Annual Meeting in March.
The competition was created to encourage students living in the United States to conduct original research and to be reviewed by their peers. Gonzalez Marrero was one of six student award winners in the national competition.
During the 2016 UFCD Spring Synergy on April 1, Gonzalez Marrero also won another award sponsored by DENTSPLY, taking first place in the ADA/DENTSPLY Student Clinician Research Program awarded by The International Association of Student Clinicians. He received an all-expense paid trip to Denver, Colorado, to present at the International Association of Student Clinicians – American Dental Annual Meeting from October 21-23, 2016, and to compete in a research competition at the meeting.
Gonzalez Marrero, a member of the DMD Class of 2019, participated in the college’s 2015 Summer Research Program as an incoming dental student. He graduated from the University of South Florida in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences. During his undergraduate studies, he worked as a student researcher in the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute looking at Tau pathology, specifically the effect of TNFα on pathological TDP43 and Tau in vitro. He also worked in the USF department of chemistry performing docking studies and MD simulations of the catalytic domain of MMP9 protein.
He works in Luciana Shaddox’s laboratory evaluating host immunoinflamatory responses in biofluids of individuals diagnosed with localized aggressive periodontitis, their siblings and healthy controls.