Two out of the five awards in 2017 go to MFPL: Iva Lucic from the group of Thomas Leonard won with her thesis entitled “Role of membrane binding in the activation of Protein Kinase B (PKB) and Protein Kinase C (PKC)”. Dorotea Fracchiolla from Sascha Martens’ group won the award for her thesis “Mechanisms of cargo-directed autophagosome formation in selective autophagy”.

The other awards went to Muhammad Mamduh Bin Ahmad Zabidi from the Stark group (IMP) (thesis title: “Enhancer-responsiveness and -specificity of Core Promoters in Gene Transcription”) and Mareike Roth (thesis title: “Exploring and Exploiting Chromatin Dependencies in Cancer”) from the Zuber group (IMP), as well as to Radka Slovak (thesis title: “The roots of development: new growth regulators from high-throughput studies on natural variation”) from the Busch group at GMI.

The awardees were selected by Javier Martinez (MFPL, Medical University of Vienna), Christa Bücker (MFPL, University of Vienna), Yasin Dagdas (GMI), Andrea Pauli (IMP) and Ulrich Elling (IMBA). Each winner was awarded a cash prize of €500.

Congratulations to the winners on their extraordinary achievements!