Dustin Valdez, a member of the Shepherd Research Lab and PhD candidate in Nutrition at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, has been named one of two Friday Session #1 winners of the peer-judging contest at the 2026 Biomedical Sciences Symposium, hosted by the John A. Burns School of Medicine on April 24–25 at the Kakaʻako campus. Dustin shares the Session #1 honor with Juliette Doumergue, and joins seven other Friday and Saturday session winners selected from across the symposium.

The Friday program featured outstanding presentations from 60 graduate and postdoctoral students, with peer judges scoring submissions across two parallel sessions. Dustin’s poster — “FibroScan signal discordance in a multiethnic Hawaiʻi cohort” — reported that 63 percent of 244 Oʻahu adults showed a tertile mismatch between FibroScan-derived steatosis (CAP) and liver stiffness (LSM), with the discordance tracking ethnicity and metabolic profile rather than appearing at random. Participants with higher fibrosis than expected were leaner and showed lower triglycerides and lower insulin resistance, while those with lower fibrosis than expected carried the highest BMI and the most adverse lipid profile. The findings motivate AI-based extraction of richer signal from FibroScan images for liver-cancer risk stratification across populations — a thread that runs through several of the lab’s current projects.

Read more about Dustin’s poster — and the four other SRL projects shown at the symposium — in our coverage of the 2026 JABSOM symposium.

Photo highlights from the symposium are available courtesy of Matthew Campbell, Director of Communications at JABSOM, on the school’s Flickr ↗.

Congratulations, Dustin — well-earned recognition for careful work on a question that matters for the populations served in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific. Thanks also to co-authors Arianna Bunnell, Brenda Hernandez, and John Shepherd, and to the JABSOM Biomedical Symposium Committee for organizing the event. More information about the symposium at biosymp.jabsom.hawaii.edu ↗.