Sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the SPARC Graduate Research Grant is a merit-based award designed to ignite research and creative excellence across all disciplines at USC. The overall objective of the SPARC Graduate Research Grant is to provide support and to encourage outstanding students to pursue exciting research directions during their graduate career at the University of South Carolina.

Nikita Kirkise (Welshhans lab) was awarded a SPARC grant for her project on the "Regulation of local protein synthesis by a laminin-integrin-RACK1 signaling pathway in growth cones." Graham McLaughlin (Hollis lab) was awarded a SPARC grant for his project focused on "Bridging the Gap Between the Genome and the Environment Using Landscape Genomics". Katelyn Rygel (Welshhans lab) was awarded a SPARC grant for studying the "Dysregulation of point contacts and local translation in Down syndrome hiPSC-derived neurons". Congrats to all!