The winners. From left to right: Dan Dominissini, Chelsea Wood, Simon Johnson and Liron Bar-Peled
To highlight the winners achievements and put forward a selection of topics from Science and SciLifeLab, two open symposia were held this week, one in Stockholm and one in Uppsala.
The Grand Prize winner and the three category winners of Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists 2014 all gave a lecture on their PhD-research for which they were awarded the prize. Thereafter, a number of researchers at SciLifeLab presented their work at the center.
Liron Bar-Peled, Grand Prize winner and Cell & Developmental Biology category winner, told about his research on the enzyme mTORC1 which regulates eukaryotic cell growth and is deregulated in some common cancers and diabetes.
– A fundamental question in biology is how multicellular organisms regulate their cell growth. The enzyme mTORC1 is a master regulator of growth; if we delete important parts of it, we see dramatic reduction in cell size compared to control animals, said Liron Bar-Peled when beginning his talk.
Liron Bar-Peled continued by describing a mTORC1 amino acid sensing pathway as well as evidence indicating how deregulation of this pathway is related to human diseases.
Ilaria Testa, one of eight newly recruited SciLifeLab Fellows, explained the technique behind STED-microscopy that she uses to depict brain tissue. The inventors of the STED technique were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014. Ilaria Testa did her postdoc studies at one of the laureates; Stefan Hells lab at the Max Plack Institute in Germany.
The prizewinners were also given an overview of SciLifeLab and the research performed here.
– It is amazing how SciLifeLab is entirely devoted to bringing together scientists from different fields. Coming from an interdisciplinary research society myself, I truly believe that the best ideas result from such close interaction, said Chelsea Wood, the Environment category winner of Science and SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists.
The symposia were followed by mingle to allow for more informal discussions.