2025 Postdoctoral Symposium Awards Postdocs for Research

The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs held its annual Postdoctoral Appreciation Week Symposium at The University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday, September 17. The event included several speakers, workshops, an interactive poster session, awards and a reception to conclude the day.

National Postdoctoral Appreciation Week is recognized annually on the third week in September, and the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs created an annual symposium for UT Austin postdocs during this special week. 

The symposium featured two keynote speakers, Dr. Mohit Tiwari and Janice Omadeke. 

Dr. Mohit Tiwari is an Associate Professor and holds the Raytheon Company Faculty Fellowship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. He is also co-founder and CEO of Symmetry Systems. Symmetry provides a cutting-edge data+AI security platform used by Fortune 500 enterprises and was spun out of Spark Lab at UT Austin.

Janice Omadeke is the exited CEO and founder of The Mentor Method, an enterprise software designed to drive transformative change within company cultures through the power of mentorship. She is the author of "Mentorship Unlocked: The Science and Art of Setting Yourself Up for Success."

Postdocs had the opportunity to attend a workshop by the Office of Career and Life Design and participate in speaker panels with hiring managers and former UT postdocs. 

Poster Session Awards

Postdocs presented their research during a poster session, and several winners were announced before the reception. Judges chose two first-place winners to receive $300 and two second-place winners to receive $200. There were two audience choice awards that received a gift bag from the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

	Natalie Nawarawong First place winner Binge alcohol-induced changes in dorsal dentate gyrus activity during contextual and cued fear recall College of Pharmacy
	Yiming Zhang First place winner Temporary Roofs Recovery in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria Bureau of Economic Geology
	Devika K Divakar Second place winner Design overview of the fiber feed for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope’s HRS McDonald Observatory
	Daeun Noh Second place winner Probing the sequence determinants of alpha synuclein aggregation using deep mutational scanning in yeast Department of Chemistry
	Donghwan Kim Audience Choice - First place winner New paradigm of band gap calculations: Including effects of atomic motions in materials Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
	Paulina A. Serrano Audience Choice - Second place winner ¡Deportistas! A sporting history of Mexican women in twentieth-century America Center for Mexican American Studies

Postdocs from UT Austin traveled to Arlington, Texas for The University of Texas Postdoc Research Symposium on Friday, September 19, 2025. This event brought postdocs, faculty and leaders from The University of Texas System together to experience career development and to promote postdoctoral research contributions to higher education and the broader research enterprise.

Two postdocs from UT Austin received awards:

First place (tied): Vidhika Damani, Effect of polymer architecture on gelation mechanics of dynamic covalent hydrogels, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering

Second place (tied): Chelsea Webber, Immune cells activate in response to alcohol in the nematode C. elegans, Department of Neuroscience

The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs would like to thank the planning committee of UT Austin postdocs, faculty and staff who helped organize this symposium.

To stay up to date with the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and learn about upcoming events, join the Postdoc Listserv.