At the Vienna BioCenter PhD Symposium, PhD student Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández from the GMI was presented with one of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Awards 2025. These awards are granted to outstanding PhD students to acknowledge their exceptional scientific contributions and to support postgraduate research and education at the Vienna BioCenter.  

His work in Yasin Dagdas’s lab at the GMI focused on the mechanistic characterization of selective autophagy receptors (SARs). Through his thesis entitled “Leveraging evolutionary diversity to discover new autophagy mechanisms in plants”, Víctor (and colleagues) developed a powerful screening pipeline to identify SARs. Through a cross-species analysis, he went on to discover a highly conserved SAR in plants, CESAR, and characterized its critical role in the degradation of protein aggregates under conditions compromising protein homeostasis, such as heat stress. These findings are now accepted in Developmental Cell.  

This year’s Vienna BioCenter PhD Award recipients include Irene Schwartz (Gijs Versteeg lab, Max Perutz Labs), Robert Kalis (Johannes Zuber lab, IMP), Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández (Yasin Dagdas lab, GMI), and Max Josef Kellner (Josef Penninger lab, IMBA). 

About Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández 

Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández received his Master’s in Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology from the University of Seville, where he focused on the molecular basis of photoperiod-induced flower senescence in Arabidopsis thaliana. Upon completion of his degree, he received an End-of-Studies Extraordinary Prize for his work.  

Víctor joined Yasin Dagdas’s lab at the GMI as a pre-doctoral intern in 2019 and started as a PhD student in the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program in 2020. In addition to his excellence in research, Víctor served as a PhD student representative at the GMI and organized the LMB-VBC PhD Symposium at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Recently, Víctor started as a postdoc in Robbie Loewith’s lab at the Molecular and Cellular department of the University of Geneva, where he will study the role of TOR kinase during rice blast infection.