Nearly 60 people attended the 2024 Tissue Microenvironment (TiMe) Day Symposium on April 3 at the Beckman Institute.

The TiME Training Program was created by Rohit Bhargava and Rex Gaskins with the Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) and is a university-wide training program for graduate students, supported by a T32 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Tissue microenvironments are critical for advancing biomedical science and healthcare in topics ranging from regenerative medicine to managing the burden of cancer. The TiME program integrates education, research, and training in three areas: imaging and sensing, bioengineering, and computational modeling and analytics.

The symposium featured four keynote speakers, who delivered talks about their various research endeavors relevant to the TiME program.

Time Day 2024 2

CCIL member Yang Liu, professor of bioengineering at Illinois, spoke with TiME Day Symposium attendees about her research in precision cancer medicine.

Visiting speakers included Sjoerd Finnema, head of molecular and translational imaging at AbbVie, and Michael King, professor of engineering at Vanderbilt University. CCIL members Yang Liu and Gregory Underhill also delivered keynote talks.

TiME program students presented research during a poster session and exchanged research ideas and discoveries with Illinois faculty and students.

To learn more about the TiME Program, contact CCIL Assistant Director for Education Marcia Pool.

TiME Day 2024

TiME program student Jin Young Yoo presents her research, “Understanding Metabolic Heterogeneity of Estrogen Receptor Positive Metastatic Breast Tumors Using Spatial Transcriptomics and Geographic Information Systems Approaches”

Time Day 2024 3

TiME program students discuss Hannah Heath’s poster, “Expsosure to neighborhood violence rewires gluccorticoid receptor binding and drives lung tumor aggressiveness”