Mark Zukowski was a graduate student in Genetics in from 1975 to 1982. He had an illustrious career at Amgen, retired at 55, being an avid enologist, he started a vineyard, and gave back to the programs (undergraduate and graduate) that got him started. His goal was helping students get to conferences, because the college sponsored his travel to a conference and it was a transformative experience. The account is currently closed, but through his generous donation the department was able to help the following students attend conferences all over the country:
| Student | Abstract title | Meeting | Place |
| Kiana Martinez | Patients diagnosed with hEDS and G-HSD have their quality of life similarly disrupted by GI symptoms | Annual Clinical Genetics Metting | Seattle |
| Joey Stolze | Investigating the mechanisms underlying genetic risk for coronary artery disease using endothelial cells | American Society of Human Genetics | Houston |
| Austin Conklin | Using eQTL effect size correlation across tissues to cluster coronary artery disease variants | American Society of Human Genetics | Houston |
| Natalie Payne | Population genomics and viromics of at-risk populations of the following Sonoran mammals | Genomics of Disease in Wildlife Workshop | Fort Collins |
| Selina Kindelay | Investigation of sequence and transcriptional activity of the Drosophila rDNA | 25th Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics | Seattle (online) |
| Esmat Karimi | Effects of OM on contractility of skeletal muscle short fibers from nemaline myopathy patients | Biophysical Society Annual Meeting | San Francisco |
| Roxanne Bantay | Variation in biosynthetic gene clusters & secondary metabolite profiles in Xylaria flabelliformis | Mycological Society of America Meeting | Gainesville |
| Ergul Ergen | Describing genetic interactions between blm and rDNA in Drosophila | Annual Drosophila Research Conference | Chicago |
| Linh Tran | Computationally efficient demographic history inference with supervised machine learning | Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics | Cold Spring Harbor |
| Sydney van Linden | Transcriptional gene networks in the lungs of mice exposed to asthma-protective microbial agents | Symposium of the Collegium Internationale Allergologicum | Montreal |
| Maureen Galindo | Chimeric TNXB/TNXA gene mutations in hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome | American Society of Human Genetics | Washington DC |
| Emily Burke | Establishing Drosophila melanogaster as a model for mechanistic study of immune priming | Entomology 2024 | Phoenix |
| Jaeho Lim | Vsb 1 regulates TORC1 signaling in budding yeast | Mechanisms of Metabolic Signaling | Cold Spring Harbor |
| Collin Krzyzniak | Regional changes in CNS ketamine exposure by an acetaminophen-induced BBB mechanism | Cerebral Vascular Biology | Ann Arbor |