Lingting Shi, a BME junior, was awarded first prize in the J&J Engineering Showcase Undergraduate Student Poster Competition. Her work entitled “An In Vitro Approach to Identify Skin Sensitizers with Classification Tools” is part of a larger project in Professor Yarmush’s lab, which aims to develop animal alternatives to environmental allergen testing. The approach has yielded exciting results which indicate that the co-culture system and analysis tools which were developed for the project can be integrated to successfully identify allergen sensitizers and their potencies, even within the elusive pro-hapten allergen class that has been previously difficult to identify. Other members of the team include: Talia Greenstein, a BME BS/MS student, and Drs. Serom Lee, Rene Schloss and Martin Yarmush.