20Th HFSP Awardees Meeting

News Awards Funding

The Human Frontier Science Program is 30 years old!

In 2019, HFSP turned 30 and a number of exciting events to celebrate the science and people that make our Organization so unique and special have been organized throughout the world. Following successful events in Washington DC in May and in Tokyo in July, a third celebration will take place in the home of the HFSPO Secretariat in Strasbourg in November.

20th HFSP Awardees Meeting

The next annual HFSP Awardees Meeting will take place in the historic town of Leuven in Belgium from 5 to 8 July 2020. The meeting will be held at IMEC, an innovation hub that specialises in nanoelectronics and digital technologies and hosts around 4000 researchers from all over the world. One of the research initiatives on the IMEC campus in Leuven is Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF) - a research centre focusing on the study of neuronal circuits and neurotechnologies. NERF Director Sebastian Haesler, an HFSP Career Development Award alumnus, will assist HFSPO with the onsite organisation.

Read more > Following 30 years of frontier research for Switzerland After almost 30 years serving on the HFSP Board of Trustees, we were sorry to say goodbye to Isabella Beretta this summer. We are grateful to Isabella for taking the time to share some of her many memories as Swiss Board member in an article which can be accessed via the link below.

2019 HFSP Nakasone Award

The 2019 HFSP Nakasone Award was bestowed upon Michael Hall of the Biozentrum, University of Basel for the 'discovery of the master regulator of cell growth, the target of rapamycin (TOR) kinase.' The award ceremony was held during the 30th anniversary celebration of HFSP in Tokyo in July.

19th HFSP Awardees Meeting

This year the annual HFSP Awardees Meeting took place at the Tsukuba International Congress Centre in Japan from 10 - 12 July.

An article on the HFSP Awardees Meeting in Tsukuba was published on Springer Nature's websites: nature.com, natureasia.com and naturechina.com. The article presents some of the scientific highlights of the meeting and includes interviews with HFSP Long-Term Fellow Luisa Pallares and HFSP Program Grant holder Rashna Bhandari. In addition to the English version, the article was published in Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Prizes & Awards

We would like to congratulate the following HFSP awardees and alumni:

Max D. Cooper of the Emory University School of Medicine received the 2019 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, together with Jacques Miller, 'for their discovery of the two distinct classes of lymphocytes, B and T cells – a monumental achievement that provided the organizing principle of the adaptive immune system and launched the course of modern immunology.' In 1996, Max Cooper was awarded a collaborative HFSP Research Grant to study lymphoid cell homing and differentiation during development.

Maria Jasin, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, on winning the 2019 Shaw Prize in Life Science & Medicine 'for her work showing that localized double strand breaks in DNA stimulate recombination in mammalian cells. This seminal work was essential for and led directly to the tools enabling editing at specific sites in mammalian genomes.' Dr Jasin received an HFSP Research Grant in 1997 to research the function and significance of the DNA dependent protein kinase.

M. Madan Babu of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge on winning the EMBO Gold Medal 'for his fundamental contributions to the field of computational molecular biology, specifically for his discoveries in the areas of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) signalling and intrinsically disordered proteins.' Madan was part of a 2010 HFSP Young Investigator Grant team working on a project titled 'Towards an integrated model of phenotypic evolution: the genetic architecture of network dynamics.'

1992 HFSP Research Grant alumnus, Rino Rappuoli, Chief Scientist and Head of External Research and Development at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines in Siena, Italy, who was awarded the 2019 Robert Koch Award. The award honors his groundbreaking work on the development of novel vaccines.

Other prizes and awards are listed in the HFSP Annual Reports

Frontier Science from HFSP Awardees

Nanoparticles help unravel novel functions of mRNA during translation

The name messenger RNA has always implied that this class of RNA molecules is an intermediate that transmits DNA information to protein. However, HFSP Program Grant holders Zoher Gueroui, Hirohide Saito and Dan Ohtan Wang suggest that mRNA functions go well beyond this simplistic view.

Major breakthrough in 200-year-old puzzle

Weber’s law is the most firmly established rule of psychophysics — the science that relates the strength of physical stimuli to the sensations of the mind. Despite being almost 200 years old, no clear way has been found to select among its many proposed explanations. Now, HFSP Long- Term Fellow José Pardo-Vazquez and HFSP Young Investigator Grant holder Alfonso Renart and colleagues have discovered a new psychophysical rule that allowed them to identify a unique and robust explanation of Weber’s law.

Individual cells cooperate in colonies by communicating via ultra-fast flows The exchange of signals between organisms occurs frequently in nature: dogs bark in the street together, crickets chirp in unison, and fireflies flash light in harmony. This communication serves diverse biological functions in different ecosystems either through immediate benefits like warnings for predators, or more long-term advantages like collective decision making. HFSP Cross-Disciplinary Fellow Arnold Mathijssen and coworkers show that not only developed life forms display this complex behavior but that unicellular protists can also exchange fast signals to serve a shared functionality within their colonies.

Read more > HFSP Alumni Portal

In September 2019, we launched the new HFSP alumni portal on the HFSP website. The new portal offers improved opportunities to share information and search for research collaborators via the directory that lists 2018 HFSP Annual Report contact details and expertise of other alumni. It is also a way to keep up-to- The 2018 HFSP Annual Report is now date with alumni news and any HFSP available on the HFSP website. events in your region. If you are an HFSP alumnus/alumna and you did not receive an invitation to register then please contact [email protected] to request registration instructions.

Impressum

The HFSP Newsletter is issued by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO). It contains announcements of HFSP-related matters and other information of interest to the support of young scientists and to interdisciplinary research in general. Please tell your friends, colleagues, students, etc. about this mailing list. They can subscribe via a link on the HFSP home page.

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