CDB PhD student Kristina Stapornwongkul wins International Birnstiel Award

In collaboration with the Max Birnstiel Foundation, the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) awards the International Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Research in Molecular Life Sciences annually. The award acknowledges outstanding talent in molecular life sciences and celebrates research successes of young, up-and-coming scientists. Kristina completed her PhD as part of the Stem and Developmental Biology PhD programme at UCL and the Francis Crick Institute. 

In her PhD work, Kristina Stapornwongkul generated an artificial morphogen system which was able to pattern the wing of the fruit fly Drosophila. This engineering approach allowed her to show that protein gradients can form by a diffusion-based mechanism and highlighted the importance of additional binding partners mimicking components of the extracellular matrix.

Read the official announcement here.