A look back at the 2023 edition of the Institut Pasteur Young Scientists Conference and award ceremony

On September 12, the senior management team and the Executive Scientific Division held the annual Institut Pasteur Young Scientists Conference. This was an opportunity to present and discuss the science carried out by early career scientists at the Institut Pasteur and to look ahead to the future of research.

During the conference opened by Stewart Cole and presented by Christophe d’Enfert, several U5 and G5 heads were invited to speak about their research. After a brief presentation of their careers to date, each presented the latest developments in the research carried out by their respective teams in their specialist fields and outlined the goals and challenges associated with their research. The following scientists spoke in turn:

• Marie-Anne Rameix-Welti (Head of the Molecular Mechanisms of Multiplication of Pneumoviruses M3P unit): Respiratory syncytial virus: From viral factories to the release of new virions

• Nadia Izadi-Pruneyre (Head of the Bacterial Transmembrane Systems U5): Structure and dynamics of bacterial motors

• Asier Sáez-Cirión (Head of the Viral Reservoirs and Immune Control U5): HIV remission: learning from the few exceptions to develop new therapeutic strategies

• Jean-Pierre Vartanian (Head of the Virus and Cellular Stress U5): Endogenous DNA mutator enzymes: the crossroad of viral stress and cancer

• Laura Cantini (Head of the Machine Learning for Integrative Genomics G5): Multi-modal learning for single-cell multi-omics data integration

• Pablo Guardado-Calvo (Head of the Structural Biology of Infectious Diseases G5): Targeting the viral envelope

• Sebastian Baumgarten (Head of the Plasmodium RNA Biology G5): Crossing borders: Transmission biology of the human malaria parasite

 

 

This series of presentations by unit heads, complete with questions from the audience, was followed by the award ceremony for the 2023 Institut Pasteur Young Scientist Prize.

The prize was introduced in 2018 for the Institut Pasteur's 130th anniversary and is awarded each year to a PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow who were first authors of high-level research papers published during the year. Exceptionally this year, in consultation with the senior management team, the Scientific Council decided to select three laureates for the award.

For this 2023 edition, Delphine Planas (post-doc category) from the Virus and Immunity Unit led by Olivier Schwartz, and Morgane Boulch and Marine Cazaux (both in the PhD category) from the Dynamics of Immune Responses Unit led by Philippe Bousso, were recognized for their respective research papers:

•    Delphine Planas for her research on the topic "Rapid isolation and characterization of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants: Resistance of Delta variant to neutralizing antibodies,"

•    Morgane Boulch and Marine Cazaux for their joint paper entitled "Car T cells collaborate to fight tumors"

 

 

Click here to watch the event

 

(Crédits photos : Institut Pasteur/François Gardy)