Five early-career researchers awarded eLife travel grants

Hernan Garcia, Heather Garvin, Parthiv Haldipur, Johannes Reiter and Andrew Sczesnak have been selected by eLife Senior Editors to receive travel grants, based on the quality of their submissions and the certainty that they would be presenting at a conference.

In this first pilot round of the eLife travel grants programme, we received close to a hundred applications, all of a very high standard. eLife Senior Editors grappled with the hard task of selecting the winners.

The grants of up to $1,000 each will allow the winners to travel to a relevant meeting of their choice and present their work, helping them to get exposure and gain recognition among leading scientists in their fields.

Hernan Garcia from the University of California in Berkeley will present at the Molecular and Developmental Biology of Drosophila conference in Kolymbari, Greece. He’s working on the fundamental principles underlying the gene regulatory code of multicellular organisms, with the ultimate objective of achieving the precise design and control of developmental programs.

Heather Garvin from Mercyhurst University will present her research into sexual dimorphism inHomo nalediat the American Association of Physical Anthropologists’ 85th Annual Meeting in Atlanta, USA.

Parthiv Haldipur from Seattle Children's Research Institute will travel to the 21st Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience in Antibes, France. Parthiv will present a poster on genetic causes and molecular mechanisms underpinning a posterior fossa phenotype spectrum that includes Dandy-Walker malformation (DWM), the most common human cerebellar malformation.

Johannes Reiter from Harvard University will travel to the AACR Annual Meeting 2016 in New Orleans to present his poster on a new approach to reconstructing the evolutionary history of cancer metastases. This research sheds light on seeding patterns and metastatic progression, with significant implications for clinical decision making.

Andrew Sczesnak, also from the University of California in Berkeley, will travel to the meeting on Gut Microbiota, Metabolic Disorders and Beyond in Newport, Rhode Island. He's working on a new method to sample millions of combinations of genetic mutants in microbial communities.

The winners will report back about their experiences as a condition of the travel grant.

eLife is looking to announce the second round of funding under the early-career travel grants programme later this spring.