eLife editors have identified seven winners who will receive funding to help them attend scientific meetings. In the coming weeks Marlene Dreux, Xavier Guell, Chloe Lahondere, Chantal Márquez, Sebastian Ocklenburg, Cristina Paulino and Lauren Schroeder will receive our support to travel to present their results.
In the first round of funding this year we received 170 high calibre applications. The Senior Editors involved in judging the candidates – Anna Akhmanova, Michael Eisen, Wendy Garrett, Eve Marder and Detlef Weigel – emphasized that their task was particularly difficult this month as the top candidates presented promising and well-matched abstracts for their upcoming talks.
This week, Lauren Schroeder from the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada, will travel to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, to discuss the evolutionary processes that have shaped skull morphology during the transition period from Australopithecus to early Homo, in both a southern and eastern African context.
Marlene Dreux will travel from CIRI (Center for Infectiology Research) in Lyon, France, to the Gordon Research Conference on Viruses and Cells at Lucca, Italy, to discuss her recent discovery on how the sensing of infected cells via physical cell-cell contact induces an antiviral response. Dreux proposes that the plasmacytoid dendritic cells recognize infected cells through specialized structures at the cell contact, which she calls interferogenic synapses, to locally secrete type I interferon at infection sites, thus confining the response to viral infections.
Xavier Guell from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge, USA will travel to the 10th International Meeting of the Society for Research on the Cerebellum and Ataxias in Sheffield, UK. Guell will present his work describing novel properties of functional neuroanatomy of the human cerebellar cortex – specifically, a triple representation of non-motor task processing, and the functional gradients that define the position of, and relationship between, functional territories in the cerebellum.
Chloe Lahondere from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, USA investigates mechanisms and structures that allow blood-feeding insects to regulate their temperature during feeding so that they avoid overheating. Lahondere will present her results at the New Avenues for the Behavioral Manipulation of Disease Vectors meeting in Tours, France this May.
Sebastian Ocklenburg from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, will present his work on using neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) to investigate the structural determinants of language processing in the left posterior temporal lobe, at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Behavioural Neuroscience in Taormina, Italy this June.
Cristina Paulino with colleagues from University of Groningen in The Netherlands used cryo-electron microscopy and functional assays to understand the regulation of lipid scrambling in TMEM16 proteins and how they can move both lipids and ions through the membrane. She will present her results at the Gordon Research Conference on Mechanisms of Membrane Transport held in New London, NH, USA.
In July, Chantal Márquez from Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, Chile will travel to Glasgow, UK for the Congress of European Microbiologists (FEMS 2019). Márquez will present new insights into uncoating kinetics of HIV capsids, obtained thanks to a novel fluorescence microscopy method, which allows researchers to follow the process in real-time.
Two more opportunities to apply for travel awards remain this year. We encourage early-career authors of eLife-published articles to take advantage of those and submit their applications by the next deadline.
We will be introducing small changes to the judging process in the next rounds of funding this year as a result of reflections from our Senior Editors – you can read more about those in our updated terms and conditions.
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