Travel Award
As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Developmental Biology (JDB), it is my great pleasure to announce that the winner of the 2018 JDB Travel Award is Ms. Victoria Deneke, BS who is a fifth-year graduate student in Dr. Stefano Di Talia’s laboratory in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University Medical Center, USA. On behalf of JDB,
Ms. Deneke will be supported with 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend the 2018 EMBO/EMBL Symposium on “Tissue Self-Organization: Challenging the Systems”.
Victoria is using Drosophila as her model organism system and addressing the mechanisms of synchronization of mitosis in the earlier phases of embryonic development, thereby ensuring coordinated normal development. She has taken an interdisciplinary approach combining molecular cell biology and embryology with quantitative live imaging and mathematical modelling, and was able to demonstrate in an elegant Developmental Cell paper that waves of Cdk1 activity synchronize the cell cycle in early Drosophila embryos. These studies provide a new mechanism by which global synchronization can arise from a spreading of local synchrony. She has received several honours and awards including a HHMI International Student Research Fellowship, a Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Fellowship and was a Notre Dame Hesburgh International Scholar.
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