Maria Ramirez-Montoya awarded the SymbNET PhD Project Award

Maria Ramirez-Montoya, PhD student from the Bacteria Signalling Lab at the IGC, is the awardee of the 1st call of the SymbNET PhD Project Award. This award funds the best collaborative research project in the context of SymbNET, aiming to promote collaborative research in Host-Microbe Symbiosis, Genomics, Metabolomics and Proteomics.

Maria will have the opportunity to collaborate with Michael Zimmermann from EMBL and will develop the project “Metabolomics changes driven by diet-host-microbes interactions”. The PhD student is “grateful for this opportunity to create collaborative ties between two outstanding institutes”, to Maria this experience will allow to “learn from the expertise of different researchers to obtain a better understanding of microbiota-mediated metabolic response to diet perturbations”.

The initiative will foster collaboration between two institutions involved in the SymbNET consortium, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC).

In Michael Zimmerman words “the SymbNET PhD award is an excellent opportunity for young scientists to learn new approaches and expand their scientific network.”  The group leader of the Metabolic Host-Microbiome Interactions Lab at the EMBL looks forward to hosting Maria in his group “and to establishing a collaborative project with the lab of Karina Xavier.”

For Karina Xavier, group leader of the Bacteria Signalling Lab at the IGC, the “groups have complementary interests and expertise, and thus this collaboration can lead the project into previously unexplored directions.” Karina adds that the award will give Maria “the opportunity to visit the EMBL and learn a new approach to study the metabolomic effect of the microbiota from a world leader in this field. “

The SymbNET PhD Award will have three editions in total, awarding 4.000 euros each.  SymbNET will additionally cover a research visit of one month (travel and accommodation will be included) for the completion of the selected project.