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VBC PhD Award for Grzegorz Sienski and Dominik Handler

Each year the VBC PhD award ceremony is a highlight after the closing lecture of the VBC PhD Symposium. This year’s happy awardees are Krzysztof Chylinski and Bettina Wurzer from MFPL as well as Dominik Handler and Grzegorz Sienski from IMBA.

 06.11.2015
f.l.t.r.: Bettina Wurzer, Renée Schroeder, Dominik Handler, Krzysztof Chylinski and Julius Brennecke (on behalf of Grzegorz Sienski)

Greg, who also received this year’s Kirsten Peter Rabitsch Award, joined the Brennecke Lab in 2010 and had been studying the influence of transposons and the piRNA pathway on chromatin patterns and gene expression. He accepted a position at the MIT in Boston earlier this year.
 
Dominik, who is also a member of the Brennecke group, was awarded for his work on the identification of functional links between piRNA biology and major cellular processes. Through an RNAi screen in Drosophila he was able to identify 50 genes that strongly impact the ovarian somatic piRNA pathway.

The VBC PhD Awards were initiated by Renée Schroeder from MFPL and are supported by the four research instituts at the Vienna Biocenter. An inter-institutional jury selects the four winners and they are awarded 500 euros in acknowledgement of their outstanding PhD theses. In addition they receive a certificate and a special collector coin by the Austrian Mint.

Congratulations to all of them!