Tropical Medicine
The Hawaiʻi Branch of the American Society for Microbiology (HI-ASM) held their annual Spring Symposium on Saturday, April 11, 2026 at the John A Burns School of Medicine. The keynote speaker for the event was Dr. Jason K. Blackburn, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. Dr. Blackburnʻs research centers on global zoonotic disease ecology, with an emphasis on international collaboration, capacity building, and the development of sustainable surveillance and training programs across low-resource and high-risk regions. The title of Dr. Blackburnʻs talk was “Bridging the Col: Environmental Reservoirs and Evolutionary Pathways – GeoAI and Genomics to Redefine Medical Geography”.
The symposium featured oral and poster presentations by students representing the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and Hawaiʻi Pacific University. Undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students competed for awards for best oral presentation, best poster presentation, HI-ASM travel awards, and the Colonel Person award for the highest scoring presentation. This year’s winners were:
