The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) has selected eight of its fellowship holders to receive the highly sought after Career Development Award (CDA). Following a rigorous selection process in a global competition, these young scientists will receive the CDA as a seed grant to jump start their first independent laboratory.
The HFSP Career Development Award (CDA) is worth $300,000 spread over three years and supports the research in the awardees first research laboratory. Not surprisingly, this HFSP award is in high demand within the community of HFSP postdoctoral fellows, many of whom aspire to carry out scientific work in their own laboratory.
The CDA is a special feature of the HFSP fellowship programs because it offers HFSP postdoctoral fellows the possibility to return to their home countries or to move to another HFSP member country after their research abroad. "The postdoc-investigator transition is the most critical step along the academic career trajectory. The CDA therefore fulfills an important role in helping the next generation of leaders in the life sciences to get their work going and establish a reputation for themselves", says Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, Secretary General of HFSP, in highlighting the Program's goal to support the new leaders in the life sciences.
The eight winners of the 2013 HFSP Career Development Award, their research institutions and research programs, are:
Pedro Beltrao (Nationality: Portugal)
European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK
Function and evolution of post-translational regulatory networks
Kerstin Gari (Germany)
Institute of Molecular Cancer Research, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Iron-sulphur clusters in DNA replication and repair
Sebastian Häsler (Germany)
Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders, Leuven, Belgium
Neural mechanisms for novelty processing
Shalev Itzkovitz (Israel)
Weizman Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Stochastic gene expression in the differentiation of mouse intestinal stem cells
Pablo Manavella (Argentina/Italy)
Instituto de Agrobiotecnologia del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina
Discovering the molecular mechanisms regulating microRNAs biogenesis and activity
Patrick Müller (Germany)
MPI for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
Systems biology of scale-invariant patterning during vertebrate development
Alex Sigal (Canada/Israel)
MPI for Infection Biology, Berlin, Germany
Using probability theory to understand the formation of a reservoir of drug insensitive infection
Ofer Yizhar (Israel)
Weizman Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Regulation of the neocortical excitation/inhibition balance along multiple timescales
Full lists of the 2013 awards are available on the HFSP web site at http://www.hfsp.org/awardees/newly-awarded
The Human Frontier Science Program is an international program of research support implemented by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) based in Strasbourg, France. Its aims are to promote intercontinental collaboration and training in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research focused on the life sciences. HFSPO receives financial support from the governments or research councils of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, UK, USA, as well as from the European Union.