Fellows round 2022

In the ninth round of the Rosalind Franklin Fellowships (2022), the Faculty of Science and Engineering has appointed five fellows. Below you will find a list of appointed fellows and a short bio of each fellow.

Gosia (Małgorzata) Włodarczyk-Biegun at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials
Kawsar Hagshenas at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Marina Trombetta-Lima at the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy
Marion Nicolaus at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences
Nicole Gervais at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences

Dr. Gosia (Małgorzata) Włodarczyk-Biegun

Dr. Gosia (Małgorzata) Włodarczyk-Biegun earned her Master's degree in Poland, in Psychology, and in Biomedical Engineering. For her PhD, she decided to continue in the field of Biomedical Engineering. She obtained the title in January 2016, at Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands, working on recombinant proteins for biomedical applications. In the years 2016-2020, she was employed at INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials, in Germany, as a postdoctoral researcher. There, she took on the challenge to set up from scratch and supervise the Bioprinting Lab. Currently, she is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Polymer Science group at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen and an Assistant Professor at the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, pursuing international collaborative work.

Her research is focused on applying 3D (bio)printing techniques to generate complex hierarchical scaffolds of polymeric materials for advanced tissue regeneration. She is also interested in the rational design and development of novel polymer-based bioinks with tunable properties allowing to induce a specific cellular response, to produce systems with bio-instructive properties.

For more information, please visit https://biofabrication.group/
You can also follow Gosia on Twitter: @gosia_wlod

Dr. Kawsar Haghshenas

Dr. Kawsar Haghshenas joined the Computer Science Department of the University of Groningen in April 2023 as an Assistant Professor in Distributed Systems. Before that, she was a postdoc at the Service Computing Department of the University of Stuttgart, where she was working on artificial intelligence workload scheduling in GPU clusters.

She received her PhD in Computer Science in 2020 from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Tehran. Kawsar was a visiting PhD researcher at the Embedded Systems Laboratory of EPFL University in Switzerland from 2017 to 2018. Her PhD dissertation was focused on machine learning-based resource management in cloud platforms. She earned her MSc degree in Computer Architecture at the Sharif University of Technology in 2014. She graduated from the Computer Engineering programme at the K.N.Toosi University of Technology in 2012, where she got her BSc degree.

Currently, her research is centered around energy-efficient system-level design and optimization of data centers, e.g., in the allocation algorithm and cooling system. The goal of her research is to improve sustainability, resource and energy efficiency, and performance of cloud computing.

For more information, please visit https://www.cs.rug.nl/ds/People/Kawsar
Dr. Kawsar is also on Linkedin, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate

Dr. Marina Trombetta-Lima

Dr. Marina Trombetta-Lima is the newly appointed Rosalind Franklin fellow in the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmacy of the University of Groningen (as of June 1).

Dr. Trombetta-Lima obtained her PhD in São Paulo, Brazil, at the lab of Prof. Mari Sogayar. She is a Fulbright alumnus at the lab of Prof. William Stetler-Stevenson at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, USA, and was a postdoc fellow at the lab of Prof. Makoto Noda in Kyoto, Japan. She moved to Groningen in 2019 to work with Dr. Amalia Dolga, Prof. Bart Eggen, Dr. Susanne Kooistra, and Dr. Inge Holtman. Currently, she specializes in brain organoids, gene editing technologies, and cellular communication with the tissue microenvironment.

Her research will contribute to the understanding of how the aged microenvironment influences the susceptibility to aging-related disorders including neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and diabetes.

For more information, Dr. Trombetta-Lina is on Twitter (@marinatlima), LinkedIn, and ResearchGate

Dr. Marion Nicolaus

Dr. Marion Nicolaus is a behavioural ecologist at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES). She completed her PhD in 2009 at the University of Groningen on the effects of the social environment on habitat choice and reproductive trade-offs in birds. For her postdoctoral work, she was first awarded a Humboldt research fellowship to study animal personality at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology (Germany). She then obtained a Juan de la Cierva grant to do theoretical modelling on dispersal evolution at the University Pablo de Olavide (Spain). She returned to the Netherlands in 2015 to study personality-dependent dispersal in birds where she was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO-ALW postdoctoral grant). In the meantime, she set-up a new research line on fish and worked for the last three years as a lecturer in GELIFES.

In her current research, Nicolaus’ group seeks to uncover why animals of the same population differ tremendously and consistently in behaviour (so-called animal personality) how such variation can help predict adaptive capacities of wildlife and help design the best possible conservation measures. Using wild populations of birds and fish, her group studies how personality variation emerges, evolves and feeds back on eco-evolutionary processes.

For more information, please visit https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.nicolaus/ or https://marionnicolaus.wordpress.com/
Dr. Nicolaus is also on Twitter (@sticklelab), LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Google Scholar

Dr. Nicole Gervais

Nicole Gervais will be joining the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences in September 2023 as an Assistant Professor in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience with an evolutionary medicine focus. Nicole obtained her PhD in Psychology/Behavioural Neurobiology in 2014 at Concordia University (Canada). She then completed a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA) before returning to Canada for a second postdoc co-sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Association and Brain Canada at the University of Toronto (Canada). Nicole has also held positions as Scientific Associate (until 2022; Rotman Research Institute) and Project Manager/Research Associate at the University of Western Ontario (until 2023).

Nicole’s research programme aims to identify how and why individual factors (particularly sex) and different environmental conditions (social interactions, access to shelter, food) contribute to neuropsychiatric disease and treatment effectiveness by focusing on specific phenotypes relating to sleep-wake patterns, social interactions, and cognition across species. Previously, Nicole has studied the importance of female physiology in sleep and cognition in rats, mice, marmosets, and humans. She uses multiple approaches, including behavioural methods (including assessment of cognitive function), neuroimaging (MRI & microscopy), sleep physiology, surgical techniques, hormone quantification, and pharmacological manipulations.

For more information, please visit https://www.rug.nl/staff/n.j.gervais
Nicole is also on Linkedin, Mastodon (@Nikigervais @urbanists.social), Twitter (@GervNiki), Google Scholar, and ResearchGate