When UC Davis undergraduate Tem Woldeyesus presented his scientific poster at the UC Davis Cancer Center research symposium recently, he did not know his project was being scrutinized by a panel of three judges.

So you can imagine his surprise learning that he had taken first place among 61 poster presentations at the annual event, most of them from researchers well out of college, graduate school and beyond.

“It was very shocking,” the Fairfield 20-year-old said during an interview from Dallas, where he was again presenting his poster: “Synthesis and Application of Multifunctional Nanoparticles for Cancer Therapeutics.”

As the winner, Woldeyesus took home $500, money he said he would use “to pay off the textbooks.”

Woldeyesus is part of Emerging Technologies Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences, a new program at UC Davis sponsored by the National Cancer Institute that gives college students from underserved populations opportunities to learn cancer science.

Woldeyesus, a junior studying neurobiology, was assigned in June to the laboratory of Kit Lam, chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology and a researcher working on use of nanoparticles to better deliver cancer drugs to tumors. He is quick to point out that his role was to figure out the science for the project and to present the theory, but that the idea for the work came from his mentor, Lorenzo Berti, a research faculty member in Lam’s lab and poster co-author.

Funding for ET-CURE comes from the the NCI’s Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities. The program is run by a collaboration between the Center for Biophotonics Education Team and the UC Davis Cancer Center.