Dario and Kerstin both got a Marie Curie Fellowship
We are happy to share the exciting news that Dario and Kerstin were both awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Individual Fellowship. These are highly competitive European fellowships aimed to support early-career scientists by offering a fully-funded postdoc position abroad for a period of 2 years, including traveling and training money. In this way, MSCAs promote mobility and interactions within the Union. As part of the EU Horizon 2020 program, they also aim to promote excellence by funding innovative and relevant research projects and/or projects that might be too risky otherwise.
Both projects will focus on the interaction between viruses and the cell surface using viral pseudotypes. Pseudotypes are particles that carry the membrane protein of the virus of interest but are not able to replicate in the host cell. In his project named “CoVentry”, Dario will investigate the early entry stages of coronavirus infection, including SARS-CoV-2. He will measure the strength of the molecular bonds between the protein Spike and the cell surface and observe how they differ between coronaviruses of varying pathogenicity.The long term goal is to understand better whether and how the characteristics of virus-membrane interaction influence disease severity. Kerstin’s project, “Remind EBOV”, centers around the highly pathogenic Ebola virus and how it interacts with the cell during landing, diffusion and egress. In particular, Kerstin will focus on the role of the mucin-like domain in modulating the interaction of the virus with glycosaminoglycans on the cell surface. Thanks to this project, we will hopefully understand better how virus-membrane interactions are modulated to optimize the infection process.
Only around 10% of the MSCA applications are founded each year and attract candidates from the best research centers in Europe. Two successful MSCA applications within the same lab are a really outstanding result which documents the quality of the research produced by our group and of its members. For these reasons, we want to congratulate Kerstin and Dario on their achievement. We are glad that they can now stay longer with us and we are looking forward to see what they will achieve within this time and the MSCA framework.
