Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Microorganisms 2023 Young Investigator Award are Dr. Eleonora Cella, Dr. Joana Vanessa Cordeiro Melro Mourão, and Dr. Ruairi Robertson.

Dr. Eleonora Cella is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Dr. Cella’s research interests are in molecular epidemiology and evolution of
human viruses and bacteria, clinical–epidemiological correlations in human viruses and bacteria, development of new bioinformatics tools for the study of human/host microbial genes, next-generation sequencing, metagenomics, phylodynamics, molecular epidemiology, genomic monitoring of emerging and re-emerging microbial pathogens.

Dr. Joana Vanessa Cordeiro Melro Mourão is a Junior Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Innovative Biomedicine and Biotechnology at the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, and a Researcher at the Department of Biological Science at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal. Dr. Mourão’s research interests are in antibiotic resistance, metals and biocide tolerance, food safety, food microbiology, foodborne bacterial pathogens, bacterial epidemiology, microbiology, mobile genetic elements, and genome evolution among Enterobacteriaceae, typing, bioinformatics, biostatistics, computational biology, data science, data mining, cutting-edge high-throughput methodologies, and machine learning.

Dr. Ruairi Robertson is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Immunology at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. Dr. Robertson’s research interests include host and nutrient interactions with the developing gut
microbiota in basic and clinical research.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Eleonora Cella, Dr. Joana Vanessa Cordeiro Melro Mourão, and Dr. Ruairi Robertson for their outstanding achievements.

As the awardees, they will receive an honorarium of CHF 1000, an offer to publish a paper free of charge before 31 December 2024 in Microorganisms after peer review, and an electronic certificate.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for evaluating the many excellent nominations.

Microorganisms 2023 Young Investigator Evaluation Committee