UConn Team Wins National Cell Bowl Championship

STORRS, CT — A University of Connecticut team has won a national Cell Bowl title.

The road to the championship began as a laboratory assignment for students in the school's Department of Allied Health Sciences and it turned into a top performance against the country's top medical laboratory sciences programs, UConn officials said.

In the fall semester, Bruce Blanchard and assistant clinical professor and director of UConn's Medical Laboratory Sciences Program, incorporated an app called CellAtlas into his hematology course to help students learn to identify different types of blood cells and pathologies. CellAtlas has a timed quiz feature that asks users to identify 30 cells in 60 seconds.

UConn officials said Blanchard originally introduced CellAtlas as a learning tool for this course, but once he started seeing students submit perfect scores in less than 30 seconds, he encouraged them to consider entering the national Cell Bowl, which began in 2021. The Cell Bowl is a competition sponsored by the American Society for Clinical Pathology in which teams from across the country compete to correctly identify hematology cells.

Two students, Lakshmi Manne and Ruth-Ann Lambert, acted as as unofficial team captains and formed a team for Cell Bowl 2022 with 12 other students.

Each week, students competed to complete five CellAtlas quizzes. The best score, the highest number of correctly identified cells in the lowest time, was submitted to the Cell Bowl.

The UConn team advanced through regionals, the semifinals, and all the way to the national Super Cell Bowl Finals. Manne completed the final quiz with a perfect score in a record-breaking 19.8 seconds, clinching the victory for UConn.

See more about the team on the UConn Today site.