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PhD candidates and have been selected as this years' Bijvoet Center PhD students of the year. They will receive the award at the upcoming Bijvoet Symposium, on 23 and 24 April 2018, where they also will present the results of their research to the audience.

Tania Morán Luengo is a PhD candidate in the Cellular Protein Chemistry group, under supervision of Dr. Stefan Rüdiger. During her PhD project, Tania solved a central paradox how molecular chaperones can fold proteins and revised the current paradigm of how that process works. The results of her work is currently in press in the journal Molecular Cell (Morán Luengo, et al., 2018).

Deniz Ugurlar was a PhD candidate in the Crystal and Structural Chemistry group, under supervision of Prof. Piet Gros. The goal of her PhD project was to obtain structural and mechanistic insights into the activation and regulation of the C1 initiation complex of the complement system. The main results of her research were recently published in  (Ugurlar et al., 2018, Science 359, 794-797). Deniz recently joined the company Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she works as an application scientist in electron microscopy. 

The Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research

The Bijvoet Center at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ studies life on the molecular scale. The focus is on the biomolecules that make up all living organisms, including humans. The researchers in the center aim to elucidate the structure of these biomolecules, such as proteins, at the atomic level and on determining the relation between their structure and function in living cells and tissues. Every year, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bijvoet Center selects a PhD student of the year from nominated candidates. Because of the very high quality of the nominated candidates, the board decided to award the honour to two PhD candidates this year.