Fellows round 2014

In the sixth round of Rosalind Franklin Fellowships, the Faculty of Science and Engineering has appointed seven fellows:

Dr. Amalia Dolga

Amalia Dolga received her MSc degree at the Department of Chemistry, West University of Timisoara, Romania (2003) spending part of her studies at Universität Bremen, Germany, and following the M.Sc. program "Biochemistry and Molecular Biology".  She earned her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She continued as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Carsten Culmsee, Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. Between 2013-2015 she pursued the Habilitation program at the Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacy, Marburg, Germany.   Since September 2015, she is appointed as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy (GRIP) of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Her research focuses on several aspects of neurodegeneration, including excitotoxicity, calcium deregulation, oxidative stress, inflammation, and mitochondrial damage.

Prof. Lucy Avraamidou

Lucy Avraamidou received her MSc degree in Science Education and her PhD degree (2003) in Science Education from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. She then worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Informal Learning and Schools at King’s College London. In 2005 she moved back to her home country, Cyprus, where she worked as an Assistant/Associate Professor at the University of Nicosia researching beginning elementary teachers’ learning and development.

In August 2016 she joined the Department of Science Education and Communication where she leads a scientific project about students’ science identities and interest in scientific careers. Research in these areas includes, but is not limited to, topics related to career aspirations, identity negotiations, life histories, equitable science, diversifying science, gender issues, out-of-school science, and science communication.

For more information please visit: http://www.rug.nl/staff/l.avraamidou/

Dr. Marthe Walvoort

Marthe Walvoort obtained her PhD degree (cum laude) with Prof. Hermen Overkleeft and Prof. Gijs van der Marel at the Leiden University, in the field of carbohydrate chemistry. Subsequently she joined the glycobiology lab of Prof. Barbara Imperiali at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) as a postdoc associate. There she led the development of phosphoglycosyl transferase inhibitors inspired by nucleoside antibiotics, and was involved in a collaborative effort to link a bacterial infection to biomarkers in multiple sclerosis by producing N-linked glycoproteins.

Since November 2015 she is appointed as an assistant professor at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Engineering, where her focus will be on the synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates from human and bacterial origin using chemistry and biology.

For more information, please visit her webpage at http://www.rug.nl/staff/m.t.c.walvoort/

Dr. Pratika Dayal

Pratika Dayal obtained her PhD at SISSA (the International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, Italy, in October 2010, after having obtained her Master's at Sussex University in the U.K. Thereupon, she carried out her research at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (Potsdam, Germany), the Institute of Astronomy (Edinburgh, UK) and the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC - Durham, UK) before moving to Groningen in 2016 to take up an Assistant Professorship as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute. Pratika's research focuses on understanding the earliest galaxies in the Universe which, as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of modern astrophysics, hold the key to understanding the beautifully complex Universe we see today. She is a founding member of the Young Academy of Groningen (YAG) and was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to fund her research in September 2016.

More details can be found at: http://pratika24.wixsite.com/pratika-dayal

Dr. Anastasia Borschevsky

Anastasia Borschevsky obtained her PhD degree at the Department of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University (Israel), under the supervision of Prof. Uzi Kaldor and Prof. Ephraim Eliav. The topic of her dissertation was “ Extension of the intermediate Hamiltonian Fock space coupled cluster method and applications to problems of heavy and superheavy elements”. She spend 2010 to 2012 at the Centre for Theoretical Chemistry and Physics (Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand) as a postdoctoral fellow. There she worked on the topic of search for variation of fundamental constants in space and in time under the direction of Prof. Peter Schwerdtfeger and Prof. Victor Flambaum. Her second postdoctoral appointment (2012) was at Helmholtz Institute Mainz, in Germany, where she researched atomic and molecular properties of superheavy elements and also worked on problems of parity violation in molecules.

Since December 2015 she is appointed as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow (assistant professor) at the Van Swinderen Institute for Particle Physics and Gravity. Her main research interests are search for variation of fundamental constants and violation of fundamental symmetries in atoms and in molecules, methods in relativistic quantum chemistry, and theoretical study of atomic and molecular properties of heavy and superheavy elements.

Dr. Sahar El Aidy

Sahar El Aidy received her MSc degree from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, in September 2006 and her PhD from Wageningen University in February 2012. Afterwards, she obtained a Marie Curie felowship to work as a research fellow at the European Institute of Onchology, Milan, Italy. In 2013, she moved back to her home country to work as a lecturer at Sadat University, Egypt. From 2014 to 2015, she worked as a research fellow at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Cetre, University College Cork, Ireland. Then, she moved to Switzerland to work as a speicalist in host-microbe interaction at the Nestle Research Centre, Lausanne. From September 2015, she is working at the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences & Biotechnology Institute, University of Groningen.

For more information on her research please visit her Researcher unique identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8950-4392 .

Dr. Kerstin Bunte

Starting 1 July 2016, Kerstin Bunte is Rosalind Franklin fellow at the Intelligent Systems group, headed by prof.dr. N. Petkov.
The position is embedded in the Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science of the Groningen Faculty of Science and Engineering.