November 18, 2022
Bulletin interne de l'Institut Pasteur
Abarca Prize, 2022 ERC Synergy Grants, Scientific Emergence Prize for Clinical Research: several Institut Pasteur scientists recognized with awards
- An Institut Pasteur scientist receives the Doctor Juan Abarca International Award for Medical Sciences (Abarca Prize)
The Abarca Prize was launched in 2021 to highlight the impact of medical and scientific advances and innovations on the international stage. It is awarded to a researcher who has made a transcendental contribution to improving the health of people and populations.
The second edition of the Abarca Prize was awarded to Professor Philippe J. Sansonetti, a microbiologist, former Head of the Molecular Microbial Pathogenesis Unit, and Professor Emeritus at the Institut Pasteur and the Collège de France. The prize recognizes his entire career, his research to elucidate the different aspects of bacteria in the Shigella genus and also his multidisciplinary work in fields ranging from biology to medicine, molecular genetics to cell biology, and immunology to the development of vaccines for dysentery.
Find out more about the Abarca Prize
- ERC Synergy 2022 : Three researchers from Institut Pasteur have been awarded
The prestigious ERC Synergy Grant helps groups of two to four outstanding researchers bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources in one ambitious project.
From the 29 winning projects (Almost 360 proposals were submitted), 3 Principal Investigators developing their research at the Institut Pasteur were awarded:
Caroline Demangel, head of the unit “Immunobiology and Therapy”, was awarded for her project ‘DRIMMS – Lipid droplets as innate immunity hubs’. The project will be carried out with Albert Pol (Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques , Spain) and with Robert G. Parton (Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Australia).
Gerald Spaeth, head of the department “Parasites and Insect Vectors” and head of the unit “Molecular parasitology and signaling” was awarded for the project ‘DECOLeishRN - Decoding epistatic genome/RNome interactions in eukaryotic fitness gain using Leishmania parasites as a unique model system‘. The project will be conducted in collaboration with Prof. Shulamit Michaeli (Bar-Ilan university, Israel) and Prof. Yitzhak Pilpel (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).
Laure Bally-Cuif, head of the department “Developmental and Stem Cell Biology” and head of the unit “Zebrafish Neurogenetics”, was awarded for the project ‘PEPS – Perpetuating stemness: From single-cell analysis to mechanistic spatio-temporal models of neural stem cell dynamics’. The project will be carried out with three German teams led by Ana Martin-Villalba (German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg), Anna Marciniak-Czochra (Institute of Applied Mathematics, Heidelberg) and Simon Anders (BioQuant, Heidelberg).
Here is the press release on ERC website
About ERC Synergy Grants
The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based in Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants.
ERC Synergy Grants support small groups of two to four Principal Investigators to jointly address ambitious research problems that could not be addressed by the individual principal investigators and their teams working alone. The projects should enable substantial advances at the frontiers of knowledge, stemming, for example, from the cross-fertilisation of scientific fields, from new productive lines of enquiry, or new methods and techniques, including unconventional approaches and investigations at the interface between established disciplines.
All the information about ERC Synergy grants are available on ERC dedicated website
Support from the Grants Office
• The Grants Office European division (GO Europe) supports you in the design and application of your ERC grant. Complementary expertise is available within our team to support you in your proposal preparation and submission, including research ethics and the support of our scientific writer.
For more information about support provided by the GO, please go to our dedicated page on webcampus
Please contact us (GOeurope@pasteur.fr) as soon as you are thinking about applying for an EC grant or if you have any question related to ERC grants.
- A member of the Hearing Institute receives the 2022 Scientific Emergence Prize for Clinical Research awarded by the Fondation Pour l'Audition
The Fondation Pour l'Audition, a non-profit foundation, is committed to developing an ambitious program to strengthen links between research, healthcare and prevention. As part of its efforts to improve hearing health, it recognizes and supports pioneering figures in hearing research, especially with its two "Scientific Emergence" prizes.
These prizes are awarded each year to two French figures in recognition of the excellence of their research and their impact on auditory science, in the two categories of clinical research and basic research.
This year's award went to Ghizlene Lahlou, an ENT surgeon at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, a university lecturer at Sorbonne Université Faculty of Medicine and a member of the Technologies and Gene Therapy for Hearing Loss team at the Hearing Institute, for her translational research into genetic hearing loss. Her projects are aimed at improving treatment for genetic hearing loss and patient prognosis, perfecting approaches to rehabilitation and developing gene therapy techniques for these conditions.