BYU Dominates the ASMS Conference Student Awards

BYU was well represented at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference in November 2021, with three graduate students receiving awards. In fact, this was the university’s best showing yet. 

One of the award recipients, Elaura Gustafson, received recognition for a project that she has been working on for the four-and-a-half year span of her graduate career. She presented research about the continuing development of a printed circuit board detection mass spectrometer engineered to analyze atmospheric Mars dust. She was given the Graduate Student Travel award for 2020, but due to COVID-19 her travel was postponed until this last November. 

Gustafson applied for this award in the first place because of an important lesson she had learned just one year prior. “I learned the importance of just going for it. Back in 2019 a visiting female professor said to the Women in Chemistry club, ‘Apply for the travel support. If you won't, who will?’” Through this experience, Gustafson became determined to do whatever necessary to attend the conference. “I am the first BYU student to have received an ASMS conference award, graduate or undergraduate student, but I am obviously not the last, '' said Gustafson. 

Pictured are Gamage, Dr. Austin and Gustafson (left to right) after the students received their awards.

Another award winner, Radhya Gamage, submitted her first paper written as a graduate student and was awarded “Best Fundamental Student Paper” by the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry. She, like Gustafson, received this award in 2020 but was invited to this year’s in-person conference. On top of receiving the award for her paper, she was given the opportunity to give an oral presentation at the conference. “I presented my research on the simplified coaxial ion trap mass analyzer. This is a new dual mass analyzer still in its early stages of development,” said Gamage. Attending this conference for the third time, Gamage took advantage of the networking opportunities and was able to learn about “the latest focus areas in mass spectrometry and the efforts being made to improve their performance.”

Pictured in the above photo is Gustafson and Gamage together at the conference.

The third award recipient from BYU, Yiran Liang, received the Graduate Student Travel Award alongside Gustafson. She was chosen to present at the conference as well and had the opportunity to share about work that she has been doing in conjunction with Dr. Kelly in their lab that focuses on single-cell proteomics. Liang described the work they have been doing as “a method that can improve the throughput based on the Nanodroplet Processing in One pot for Trace Samples platform developed in our lab.”  

Usually when the digested proteins from a single cell are being analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, it can take anywhere from two to three hours. The method that Liang presented at the conference was able to expedite this process as she explained:“ [the method] uses a series of isobaric chemical labels and metabolic labeling to improve the throughput of the LC-MS analysis up to 34 times... That means, 34 times the amount of cells can be analyzed using the same MS time, which can save cost and allow better statistical analysis of single-cell proteomics.” After she presented, she got to speak with a lot of researchers who were interested in possible cooperation. In regards to BYU’s showing at the conference, Liang said that she “saw attendees recognize BYU much better in the field.” 

BYU students hope to be able to attend the next ASMS conference and continue to gain more recognition amongst others in the field. Dr. Austin has been attending this conference for 20 years. He said: “I’ve never seen students from our department pick up so many awards at the conference. Usually we get one if we are lucky. Most years none.” With this year’s record three student award winners, perhaps November’s conference is the start of something great for the university. 

Photos courtesy of Elaura Gustafon. Written by Xani Eckel.