Student researcher Nia Ho receives first place award at AAAS Annual Meeting

Student researcher Nia Ho receives first place award at AAAS Annual Meeting, one of the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific conferences

Nia Ho, a student researcher in the Komatsu Laboratory at the UCSF Department of Surgery and an undergraduate student at Pitzer College, received 1st Place in the Physical Sciences category at the 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. Her presentation, titled “Facilitating 3D Spheroid Formation in Microwells via a Simple Pluronic F127 Coating,” was selected for the Student E-Posters – Physical Sciences session. The project focused on developing a simple and reproducible coating strategy using Pluronic F127 to improve uniform 3D spheroid formation in microwell culture systems. The study demonstrated that optimized low-concentration F127 coatings significantly improved spheroid morphology and consistency across multiple cell types, supporting broader applications in organoid engineering, regenerative medicine, and drug testing.

The work was conducted in the UCSF Department of Surgery under the mentorship of Dr. Hirotake Komatsu and collaborators at UCSF (Dr. Sunita Ho at Department of Dentistry).

News source: https://www.aaas.org/resources/2026-aaas-annual-meeting-posters