In the latest round of funding, we received 100 strong and diverse applications for travel grants, spanning all areas of eLife’s publishing. From that group, eLife editors selected Rafael Catao, Alice Clement, Michael Harrap, Ezgi Karaca, Silas Boye Nissen, Alan Park, and Carina Soares-Cunha to receive funding for travel to present their latest results at their chosen meetings. Our Editor-in-Chief, Michael Eisen, as well as Deputy Editors Eve Marder and Detlef Weigel, and Senior Editor Cynthia Wolberger, were involved in judging the shortlisted candidates.
Rafael Catao from the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Brazil, who previously co-authored this article, will present his current research into the epidemiology of dengue fever at the Geomed conference in Glasgow, UK. Catao will talk about the diffusion of dengue fever in Sao Paulo state in Brazil – highlighting its most important socio-environmental determinants, as well as mapping the process and its barriers.
Alice Clement from Flinders University, Australia, the corresponding author of this article, will present her work on the anatomy of the pharynx of the Devonian tetrapodomorph fish, Gogonasus, at the International Symposium on Early and Lower Vertebrates in Qujing, China. Her results, revealed by synchrotron and neutron tomography, constitute an important addition to our understanding of the breathing and feeding organs in evolution from fish to tetrapods.
Michael Harrap from the University of Bristol, UK, the first author of this article, investigates how pollinators interact with floral displays, with a particular focus on signals that are overlooked by humans due to differing sensitivities to temperature and humidity. He will travel to the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Summer Conference in Konstanz, Germany, to present his results.
Ezgi Karaca from Izmir Biomedicine and Genome Center, Turkey, a co-author of this article, will travel to the joint meeting of the 27th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the 18th European Conference on Computational Biology in Basel, Switzerland. Karaca investigates the TAM receptor tyrosine kinase family, which functions as a homeostatic regulator in adult tissues. Izmir’s group has discovered a mechanism behind the selective binding of one of these kinases (Axl) to a specific ligand (Gas6), which holds great potential to assist targeted therapeutic strategies. The computational framework Karaca will present in Basel, which aided this discovery, can be used to dissect the selectivity of other paralogous receptor-ligand interactions.
Silas Boye Nissen from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, the first author of this article, will travel to the qBio 2019 Conference in San Francisco, USA, to talk about the paradox of the stability of multicellular organisms in light of the complexity and diversity of living forms. He will present his group’s theory, supported by testable examples, that stability, complexity and diversity are emergent properties in populations of proliferating polarised cells.
Alan Park from Columbia University, New York, USA, the first author of this article, will travel to the International Brain Research Organization meeting in Daegu, South Korea, to present his work on synaptic tagging and capture processes. From the mechanism for synaptic potentiation, to the identification of a new plasticity-related product, Park’s work has implications for understanding physiological processes at the foundations of memory.
Carina Soares-Cunha from the University of Minho, Portugal, a co-author of this article, will travel to the International Society for Neurochemistry meeting in Montréal, Canada, to present her work on modulation mechanisms of neural circuits responsible for decoding reward and aversion signals. Soares-Cunha has shown that encoding of either reward or aversion depends on the pattern of activation of medium spiny neurons (MSN) (as well as their downstream targets) rather than their type, challenging the current dominant views on this mechanism.
One more opportunity to apply for travel awards remains this year. We encourage early-career authors of eLife-published articles to take advantage and submit their applications by the deadline of September 1.
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