Members of the Parker Chamber of Commerce were at the Colorado State Capitol on business March 11 when they happened by the ornate West Foyer, where they were met by a forest of research posters and young scientists waiting eagerly to present their research to curious passersby.
Two of the members – Pamela Warrior and Billy Walker – shared how impressed they were by what they heard and learned.
“We spent most of our time at a breast cancer poster,” Warrior said. The presenter, she added, “is very informed and educated about breast cancer. I know people who have had breast cancer and hearing that one in eight women will have breast cancer sounds very high to me. So, I think her research will be super important moving forward.”
“I have a lot of women in my family, so what she’s doing really speaks to me,” Walker said. “From what she showed us on her poster, she’s doing great things. I’m very happy that someone’s working on that.”
Those are exactly the kinds of reactions that Project Bridge Colorado, a campus organization at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, was hoping for when it organized this year’s edition of the annual STEM Poster Day at the Capitol.
Posters and presenters
Project Bridge invited undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs from across the state to present their research work to lawmakers and the public with as little jargon as possible. The CU School of Medicine was well represented among about 50 posters and presenter groups, which also included other CU divisions, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Regis University.
Among those on hand to share their work was Akshay Pareek, PhD, a postdoc fellow in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology. He presented research into whether listeria infection, a foodborne bacterial illness, can increase the risk of other diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, pneumonia, or arthritis.
Elsewhere, third-year graduate student Lillian Folts shared how an appendage of the ovary called the rete ovarii, mostly ignored by science for more than a century, is being “rediscovered” and investigated for possible links to fertility issues.
Second-year medical student Parker Juels told of a pilot workshop he helped develop for first-year students on ways to promote access to care for patients and navigating the health care system.
First-year graduate student Madison Cho-Richmond discussed using artificial intelligence tools to determine the accuracy of maps of cells in the brain, contributing to insights into diseases like Alzheimer’s.
And second-year immunology graduate student Mohammad Mansoor talked of his work on lupus, a systemic autoimmune disease, and whether cells in the intestine could be related to the onset of an autoimmune response, leading to lupus.
STEM Poster Day 2025 presenters, volunteers and Project Bridge Colorado organizers pose on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on March 11, 2025. Photo courtesy of Rachael Kostelecky.
‘Science affects everyone’
Project Bridge’s mission is to foster public interest in primary science research in medicine and other fields, and to help young scientists learn to communicate their work more effectively to a general audience. STEM Poster Day is one of many Project Bridge outreach activities that seek to bridge the gap between scientists and the public.
The event offers an opportunity “for people who interact with these presenters to see how important their research is, how it might affect them, and why it’s so important to keep funding alive in science,” says Rachael Kostelecky, president of Project Bridge Colorado and a third-year PhD student in the molecular biology graduate program.
Project Bridge coaches the presenters on how to develop posters understandable to a general audience and then offers feedback on their presentations.
“Science affects everyone, even if you don’t realize it,” Kostelecky adds. “Presenting science in a jargon-free way to non-scientists will hopefully highlight why you should care about what we’re doing, how it might affect you, why some of your taxpayer dollars fund what we do, and why that funding is critical to maintaining progress on research.”
Earlier, Kostelecky and two of her lab associates and STEM Poster Day organizers – Gabrielle Vragel and Elizabeth Spear – were invited into the Senate chamber by state Senator Dafna Michaelson Jenet to be recognized by lawmakers.
Left: Rachael Kostelecky, president of Project Bridge Colorado. Photo by Mark Harden | CU School of Medicine. Right: STEM Poster Day at the Capitol organizers Gabrielle Vragel, Kostelecky, and Elizabeth Spear pose with Colorado Senator Dafna Michaelson Jenet (right) in the state Senate chambers. Photo courtesy of Rachael Kostelecky.
‘She would love it’
Charged with keeping things engaging and relatable, the young scientists sprinkled clever turns of phrase in their posters.
Jeremy Brown, a third-year student in the Cell Biology, Stem Cells, and Development (CSD) graduate program, presented a poster on microtubule structure in neurological disorders. His poster's title began: "Tiny Tubes, Big Problems."
Brendan Hinckley, an MS candidate in the Modern Human Anatomy Program, and Quynh Pham, an undergrad interning in the lab of neurology assistant professor Christy Niemeyer, PhD, presented research on links between the human gut and Alzheimer's disease. They called their poster "A Gut Feeling," and their conclusions were titled "Food for Thought: Digesting the Next Steps."
Laura Martin of Pennsylvania and her husband, Michael Martin, were on the second day of a vacation visit to Denver when they stopped by the poster-day event.
“I have a daughter who is pre-med at Temple University. She would go crazy in here. She would love it,” Laura Martin said. She said the presenters she and her husband spoke with did “an awesome job in explaining their cutting-edge research in layman’s terms.”
Posters from the 2024 STEM Poster Day at the Capitol will be available soon at the Project Bridge Colorado website.
Photo at top: Presenters and visitors gather in the West Foyer of the Colorado State Capitol for STEM Poster Day at the Capitol on March 11, 2025. Photo by Mark Harden | CU School of Medicine.
