Douglas Alexander, a Physics junior, received an award for best undergraduate poster presentation in Chemistry, Physics and Earth Science category at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences. Douglas won a certificate and a cash award for his poster titled “Conductance hysteresis in voltage-gated potassium ion channels.”

Douglas presented preliminary results of a research project aimed at detecting hysteretic effects in voltage-gated ion channels and using these effects for development and testing of kinetic models of ion channel gating. His work was done in the Biophysics Lab under the direction of Prof. Armin Kargol.

The 87th Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Academy of Science was held on March 9, 2013 at Grambling State University. The keynote speaker was Prof. John Perdew, a theoretical physicist from Tulane University.