In the last round of funding this year, eLife Senior Editors have chosen eight applicants to receive travel grants. Adam Williamson, Eszter Vladar, Feiran Lu, Hadi Boukhatmi, Laura Lewis, Manuela Schmidt, Marco Galardini and Nathaniel Safren will soon be presenting their research at scientific meetings with eLife’s support.
In this round we received 70 applications of a very high standard, from across the life sciences disciplines, from basic science to translational research. Shortlisted candidates were judged by Senior Editors Anna Akhmanova, Wenhui Li, Didier Stainier, Jeff Settleman and Huda Zoghbi.
Adam Williamson from the University of California, San Francisco (USA) will travel to ASCB/EMBO Meeting 2018 in San Diego, USA, to present his work on engineering phagocytic receptors to help understand the signalling related to the removal of dead cells, with a view to target the engulfment process at cancer cells.
Eszter Vladar, University of Colorado School of Medicine (USA), will present her latest research at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference. Vladar will talk about identifying cellular targets and molecular mechanisms of defects that result from cycles of injury and incomplete repair brought on by chronic inflammation and infections, which are common in patients suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.
Feiran Lu from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (USA) will travel to Qingdao, China, for the 3rd Qilu Youth Forum. Lu investigates cholesterol transportation mechanisms in mammalian cells, and she has recently gained new insights into how certain proteins release cholesterol from lysosomes.
Hadi Boukhatmi from the University of Cambridge (UK) will travel to Porto, Portugal, for the Joint Meeting of the Portuguese, Spanish and French Societies for Developmental Biology. He will present his recent discovery of how a subset of early specified progenitor stem cells in tissues is able to remain undifferentiated and remain available to repair tissue damage, even into adulthood.
Laura Lewis and Manuela Schmidt will both travel to the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego, USA.
Based at Massachusetts General Hospital (USA), Laura investigates the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate arousal states and develops new neuroimaging approaches. She will present her latest results that identify a focal set of thalamic nuclei engaged selectively in awakening from sleep, suggesting possible mechanisms for regulating cortical electrophysiological state.
Manuela will travel from Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine (Germany). In San Diego she will cover her research on perception of force in peripheral sensory neurons. Schmidt has recently revealed that the phosphatase Mtmr2 and its substrates form part of the complex cellular machinery regulating mechanotransduction in the somatosensory system of vertebrates.
Marco Galardini from EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (UK) will present his research into the mechanisms behind the conservation of gene function at the International Conference on Systems Biology in Lyon, France. Galardini’s recent experiment provided an important insight into conditional gene essentiality changes across genetic backgrounds in four diverse yeast strains.
Nathaniel Safren from the University of Michigan (USA) will share his efforts to identify compounds that enhance the clearance of disease-associated misfolded proteins via autophagy at the RNA metabolism in Neurological Disease Conference in San Diego, USA.
We congratulate all the grantees we were able to support this year.
We will review the feedback and results from this year’s programme, and open for applications again in early 2019.
We welcome comments, questions and feedback. Please annotate publicly on the article or contact us at hello [at] elifesciences [dot] org.
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