Competitive DOC fellowships for three IMP students
The Austrian Academy of Sciences announced the award of competitive DOC fellowships to PhD students at the IMP: Fernando Becerril, Sabrina Horn, and Franziska Reiter secured the triple-success for the IMP.
DOC Fellowships of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) are awarded to “highly qualified doctoral candidates” in any area of research. This year, three PhD students at the IMP were selected for this competitive recognition: Fernando Becerril from the lab of Elly Tanaka; Sabrina Horn from the lab of Jan-Michael Peters; and Franziska Reiter from the lab of Alexander Stark. The fellowships go towards the students’ salaries and are important academic merits.
Fernando Becerril is a second-year PhD student, working on regeneration in amphibians and mammals with IMP Senior Scientist Elly Tanaka. More precisely, Fernando aims to characterise the transcriptional regulators that drive limb development, and the epigenetic mechanisms leading to the silencing of the limb developmental program in mammalian limb fibroblasts. Fernando studied biology and did his Master’s in biochemistry at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he evaluated the effect of a high-fat diet on the chromatin architecture of circadian genes in the liver.
Sabrina Horn, a second-year PhD student with IMP Scientific Director Jan-Michael Peters, studies how the genome is organized. Specifically, Sabrina investigates how the protein complex cohesin folds and extrudes DNA into loops which have important structural and regulatory functions in the genome. To address this, she uses cutting-edge single-molecule microscopy techniques that allow her to directly visualise DNA loop extrusion. Prior to joining the IMP, Sabrina studied biochemistry in Tübingen (Germany) with a Master’s project at the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics (Denmark).
Franziska Reiter is also in her second year of her PhD studies, building on a Master’s project with IMP Senior Scientist Alexander Stark, whose lab studies how gene expression is regulated. In the frame of her research, Franziska works on characterizing the full sets of regulatory proteins that bind to different classes of enhancers and how these enhancer proteomes differ between active and inactive enhancer sequences. Prior to joining the IMP, Franziska studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna.
All three new DOC fellows are PhD students in the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program. Are you interested in a world-class career in molecular biology? Find out more: https://training.vbc.ac.at/
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