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HUPO Connect 2020 - Early Career Researcher Competition: “Proteomics Highlight of the Year”

The Early Career Researcher Initiative (ECR) of the Human Proteome Organization is pleased to announce the sixth ECR Manuscript Competition to take place online at HUPO Connect 2020!

The manuscript competition was first initiated at HUPO 2015 in Vancouver and is a unique opportunity for early career researchers to gain visibility in the proteomics community. It serves as a platform to highlight the important contributions that postdoctoral fellows, young clinicians and junior faculty members make to the proteomics field. We will repeat this highly successful event online at HUPO Connect 2020 from October 19-22, 2020.

HUPO is pleased to announce the three winners of the 2020 Early Career Researcher (ECR) Competition. The announcement was made during the Closing Ceremony at HUPO Connect 2020, where each winner presented their work. Congratulations to the three winners on their outstanding presentations!

Maria Robles (First Place Winner)

(Maria Robles studied Biology at the University of Leon (Spain) to then moved to Madrid (Universidad Autonoma) to do her doctorate degree studying apoptosis in the immune system. After that she did her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Charles Weitz (Harvard Medical School) where she established the first in vivo system to identify circadian core clock components by affinity purification-mass spectrometry. She then joined the laboratory of Matthias Mann (Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry) with Marie Curie Fellowship to pioneer the application of quantitative proteomics to the circadian field; describing, for the first time, endogenous daily rhythms of proteome and phosphorylation in total mouse livers as well as in isolated liver mitochondria. Since April 2017 Maria is a Tenure Track Professor at the LMU Munich, her research focuses on the study of circadian clock mechanisms from molecular to system levels using mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics.

Marian Kalocsay (Second Place Winner)

Marian Kalocsay studied biochemistry at the University of Hannover, Germany, and was trained as a cell biologist by Stefan Jentsch at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Munich, where he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University for work on SUMO-dependent reactions to persistent DNA double-strand breaks. As a postdoctoral EMBO fellow, he continued his training with Danesh Moazed and Steve Gygi at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. In Steve’s lab he acquired expertise in mass spectrometry and developed a quantitative analysis pipeline for peroxidase catalyzed proximity labeling. Marian became an Instructor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and leads the proteomics group in the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP). Using proximity proteomics, he published on drug-induced changes in the molecular environment of G-protein coupled receptors, cardiac voltage-gated calcium channels and cilia.

Jakob Trendel (Third Place Winner)

Jakob Trendel is highlighting the ‘protein’ in ‘protein-RNA’ interactions: Developing new proteomic approaches towards RNA biology Jakob is transferring the quantitative powers of mass spectrometry to a field that is still dominated by RNA sequencing. Jakob received his PhD from EMBL and the University of Heidelberg working for Jeroen Krijgsveld on the purification of UV-crosslinked protein-RNA complexes for their proteomic analysis. More recently he has received the EMBO long term fellowship and joined Bernhard Küster’s lab at the Technical University Munich to study the dynamics of protein-RNA interactions during the repair of DNA damage. During the pandemic the Küster lab has joined efforts with labs from Munich and the UK to deceiver the protein interactome of SARS-coronavirus 2 during the infection of human cells.