The SEB President’s Medals are awarded annually to young scientists of outstanding merit. This year’s awards was be presented at the SEB Annual Conference 2024, which tuuk place from 2nd July - 5th July 2024. There is one award per section of the SEB (Animal, Cell, Plant).
Many congratulations to our very worthy winners of the 2024 SEB President’s Medal awards:
Tommy is an experimental animal ecological physiologist working with aquatic ectotherms, primarily fish. His research is focused on understanding the functional and ecological consequences of variation in whole-animal metabolic rate, especially variation among individuals within species, and how this variation interacts with the environment to determine responses to environmental and climate change. Among other things, his work has shown how variation in metabolic rate – both on its own and through its scaling relationship with body mass – can shape the performance of individuals through interactions and trade-offs with food intake and growth, behaviour, and differential sensitivity to environmental temperature, salinity, and oxygen availability.
Tommy received his PhD in 2014 from the Section for Zoophysiology at Aarhus University in Denmark, after which he did three postdocs at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources (DTU Aqua) in Denmark. Tommy is now a Senior Researcher at DTU Aqua.
I am a Group Leader in Cellular Neuroscience and MRC Career Development Fellow. I am interested in investigating mechanisms of blood-brain barrier (dys)function in neurodegenerative diseases using patient-derived stem cells, gene editing (CRISPR-Cas 9) and organ-on-a-chip technologies.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Pharmacy with Honours (BPharm(Hons)) from the University of Mosul, I studied for Masters and Doctoral degrees at Sheffield Hallam University, investigating the mechanisms of brain water transport where I discovered a novel pharmacological framework for developing drugs to treat traumatic brain injuries and stroke.
I held my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital where I spent 3 years. During this time, I developed 3D in vitro models to investigate mechanisms involved in improving the effectiveness of therapeutic antibodies for Alzheimer’s disease in collaboration with Biogen.
I moved to Oxford and joined DPAG in late 2020, working on CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering of human iPSC-derived neurons from Parkinson’s patients to investigate molecular disease mechanisms in collaboration with GSK. In 2021, I was awarded the Leverhulme Research Fellowship that enabled me to start my independent work and I became a Departmental Research Lecturer.
In 2023, I launched my research group at DPAG and Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, which is funded through my MRC Career Development Fellowship.
Our group aims to investigate mechanisms of blood-brain barrier (dys)function in neurodegenerative diseases and brain injuries using patient-derived stem cells. We design and build innovative dynamic 3D multicellular in vitro model to accurately recapitulate the brain and BBB function under neuroinflammation and other neurodegenerative-relevant conditions.
Pallavi grew up in India surrounded by rice fields and her grandfather’s mango orchards, sparking her interest in plants at an early age. She obtained her BSc (Botany, Chemistry) and MSc (Biochemistry) at University of Lucknow (India). In 2011, she was awarded the CSIR-Junior Research Fellowship to pursue a PhD at National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi (India), where she worked on defining MAPK signal transduction networks and submergence tolerance in rice. Pallavi’s PhD work has been recognised by INSA- and NASI- Young Scientist Awards (2019, 2017) from the Academy of Sciences in India. In October 2015, she joined Cornell University (USA), where her work on rice-xanthomonas interactions revealed a novel role of pathogenic TAL-effectors in bidirectional transcription in rice, contributing to the understanding of disease susceptibility. In 2017, Pallavi moved to University of Cambridge (UK) to work with Professor Julian Hibberd and was appointed the John Henry Coates Research Fellow at Emmanuel College in 2018. At Cambridge, her research focussed on transcriptional regulation of C4 photosynthesis. Her work demonstrated that C4 plants utilise C3 ancestral gene regulatory networks to rewire C4 photosynthesis, marking a crucial conceptual advancement in comprehending the evolution of C4 photosynthesis. Moreover, her pioneering work on monocot grafting overturned the consensus dating back thousands of years that cereal and related species do not graft. These findings have provided a valuable research tool to explore plant physiology, genetics and inter-organ signalling in various cereal crop systems.
Since September 2022, Pallavi is a Lecturer at the University of Essex (UK). Her research group focuses on studying various aspects of water use strategies in crop plants. The lab aims to enhance photosynthetic productivity by concentrating on the complementary requirement to balance plant water supply with carbon gain, maximising water use efficiency. The overarching goal of their research is to develop more water-efficient crops and promote climate-smart agriculture.
