Students 2013

I am very happy to receive this award. It is wonderful to know that my work is appreciated and, particularly as a PhD student, this kind of acknowledgment encourages me that the direction of my project is a promising one.

I am grateful to all of the people that help and support me every day during my PhD.

I am honored to have been selected for this first edition of the iGE3 PhD salary awards. This fellowship will help me to continue my research on genetic factors controlling pancreatic endocrine cell plasticity. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank my mentor Pedro Herrera for his support and all laboratory members for their precious help and collaboration.

I feel very honoured and inspired in receiving the iGE3 Salary Award 2013. I am happy that I am part of the iGE3 initiative and the salary award would be of immense help for my PhD. I Look forward to the support and utilising the platform in understanding my model of study and developing new techniques. This is a noble initiative in inspiring students and probing them to use the immense amount of information available in the form of genetic signature in biological systems.

As a medical doctor, I have a strong interest in understanding psychiatric disorders at a biological level, and this curiosity led me to start a PhD thesis in the laboratory of Pr. Dayer. The genetics of neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia have been studied for many years. Thanks to the iGe3 salary award, I will be able to take advantage of the discoveries from genetic studies in human patients to study one particularly interesting schizophrenia risk gene in the development of cortical circuitry. This research will hopefully allow us to have better understanding of the origin of certain brain function abnormalities from which schizophrenic patients suffer. I am grateful to the institute of genetics and genomics of the University of Geneva for giving me the opportunity to push my project one step forward.

It was a great pleasure to learn that I had received the iGE3 student salary award based on work I have done and plan to achieve. I have the chance of working on a very interesting, challenging and fruitful project in the field of parasitic infection and all of that in a great and friendly group. I have had amazing opportunities traveling abroad not only for conferences but also for lab work which significantly broadened my knowledge and I am happy as this grant will not only allow me to continue working in a field I really enjoy but will also contribute significantly to my future career.

I feel honoured and extremely grateful to the iGE3 graduate students salary award committee for giving me the opportunity to further pursue my PhD research. Winning this award provides me with renewed inspiration and great motivation to drive forward research issues in modelling interspecific genomic mixing which will lead to significant contributions in the fields of evolutionary biology and conservation biology.