Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Biosensors, I am very pleased to announce that the winner of the 2018 Travel Award for a PhD Student, sponsored by Biosensors, is Mr. Alain Lombard, who is in the first year of his doctoral studies at the University of Grenoble in France. He will be supported with 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend the “International Meeting on Optical Biosensors” in Ghent in November 2018, where he will present his work.

The goal of his PhD is to understand the signal processing in mechanotransduction in magneto-active substrates combined with FRET biosensors. He aims to use these devices as a new tool to study mechanotransduction in single cells by exerting a local and dynamic stimulation and reading the response of the signalling pathway.

Also, I am very pleased to announce that the winner of the 2018 Travel Award for a Postdoctoral Scientist, sponsored by Biosensors, is Dr. Jaione Etxebarria, who is an early-career scientist working in the microfluidics group at the UPV/EHU Research Group, located in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. She will be supported with 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend the “22nd International Conference on Miniaturized Systems in Chemistry and the Life Sciences (MicroTAS 2018)” in Taiwan in November 2018, where she will present the latest work on this project.

Her work investigates a new design concept to solve the limitations of generating packed particle supports inside microfluidic devices, rendering reproducible volumes of the packed structures confined to a precise area. The architecture features an easyto- use design for generation of silica bead supports, similar to the columns typically used in chromatography, where a variety of materials such as biosensors can be easily retained, showing minimal influence in flow conditions.

Dr. Etxebarria has already been the recipient of several grants and awards, has presented her work at international conferences, and published over 10 scientific papers.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Jeff D. Newman
Editor-in-Chief, Biosensors