ABRF 2013: Best Poster Competition.

With the continuing mission of providing significant educational opportunities to the ABRF membership, the Education Committee (EdComm) has a proud heritage of overseeing the Water's Research Poster competition for the annual meeting. The competition is open to all, and includes scientific reports from academia as well as cutting edge research from core facilities and corporate R&D groups. The goal of offering the awards is to elicit the highest level of information on techniques, applications and technologies and share knowledge pertinent to further excellence in core facility services. The process for judging the poster submissions begins with the author submitting an abstract on-line during the registration procedure. The author chooses a submission category and self-selects whether to be considered for competition. Each abstract is reviewed by at least 3 members of the Education Committee based upon on the following criteria adapted from the Annual BioMedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS): development of an hypothesis or statement of the problem, description of methods and controls, clarity in the presentation of results, a conclusion that summarizes the results, and impact of the results to the core facility mission. The entire committee comes to a consensus as to the semifinalists. All semifinalists must agree to give a short oral presentation during the poster review session for the EdComm and to give a 15 minute talk at a regular meeting session if they are a winner. During the annual meeting, teams of EdComm members circulate through the poster session and evaluate the semi-finalist presentations. The metrics used for evaluating abstracts also contain information on how to judge (rank) each of three additional aspects determined during the designated poster presentation: clarity of the poster presentation, originality and contribution to the core facility, and oral presentation. Four finalists are ultimately selected. Competition has provided the ABRF membership with excellent posters to enjoy during the annual meeting. The presentation by finalists during the annual meeting is an opportunity to obtain further information on the science behind the poster. We are fortunate to provide ABRF attendees with this opportunity and thank Waters Corporation for continuing their support of this award by providing a monetary honorarium to the winners. The Education Committee proudly congratulates the winners of the ABRF 2013 Waters Best Poster Award: Katia Sol-Church Uniparental Disomy is Associated with Embryonal Rhabdomyosarcoma in Costello Syndrome and Nonsyndromic Patients: From Core-Side to Bed-Side and Back Again, Impact of Core Laboratories on Biomedical Research Nemours Center for Pediatric Research, A.I. duPont Hospital for Children Wilmington, DE Anthony Yeung Mass Spectrometry Data Collection in Parallel at Multiple Core Facilities Operating TripleTOF 5600 and Orbitrap Elite/Velos Pro/Q Exactive Mass Spectrometers Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA Martha Stapels Increased Throughput for 2D LC in the Analysis of Human Placental Samples Waters Corporation, Milford, MA Kanhav Khanna Visualizing the Transcriptome: A Comparison of Different RNA Library Preparation Methods The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center