BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022

And the winner is...

BioSB yearly presents an award at the BioSB conference for a young researcher who has significantly contributed to the bioinformatics or the systems biology research community in the Netherlands. 

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022 unanimously chose Janani Durairaj as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022. Janani, who is working as a computational biologist at the interface of protein structural bioinformatics and machine
learning at the Torsten Schwede Computational Structural Biology Group, University of Basel, Switzerland, will receive the award on June 28 at 16.30, after which she will give an honorary lecture. 

Biography

Janani Durairaj is a computational biologist working at the interface of protein structural bioinformatics and machine learning. She completed a dual major, a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science and a Master's in biological science, from BITS Pilani, India. During the last year of her masters, she traveled to Wageningen University for an internship in protein-protein interface prediction at the Bioinformatics group. In August 2017, she then started her PhD in this group supervised by Dr. Aalt-Jan van Dijk and Prof. Dick de Ridder. Her PhD research involved development of novel approaches combining homology modeling, structural and chemical feature extraction, and machine learning. This enabled her to predict and understand which fragrance molecules are produced by different terpene synthases, which in turn informed experimental studies by collaborators in the lab. Along the way, she developed computational protein structure representations drawing inspiration from the fields of robotics and computer vision. She defended her PhD thesis "Computational approaches to discover novel enzymes for fragrance and flavour" in September 2021 and obtained her degree at Wageningen University with the distinction cum laude. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Torsten Schwede at the University of Basel, working on protein representations and benchmarking for computational drug discovery.

Structure is the new sequence

The relationship between protein sequence and function is highly intertwined with the intermediate protein structure. Dramatically improved protein structure prediction and the ever-growing number of experimentally solved protein structures have led to an age where large-scale protein function exploration studies can now incorporate a gold mine of structural information instead of or along with the typically used sequence information. We develop novel computational representations based on predicted and experimental protein structures which consider various perspectives such as the topological shapes of three-dimensional substructures, the inherent dynamic nature of proteins, their many interactions with ligands, the underlying physicochemical and electrostatic properties of the amino acids involved, and so on. These representations are used in machine learning algorithms to link proteins to their function, while pinpointing residues and structural regions most likely to be responsible for carrying out this function. We apply these approaches across different protein families, and specifically to the family of terpene synthases, which share a common structural fold across wide sequence diversity and are responsible for the large variety of plant fragrances around us.

 

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~ ​​We thank all group leaders and nominees for their efforts. ~

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Call for nominations - closed

During the BioSB 2022 on June 28, we will present the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022. The winner will receive a voucher of 500 Euros sponsored by the BioSB research school (to be spent on conference or course participation of their choice) and will be invited to present an honorary lecture in the plenary programme.

The submission deadline was May 15th, the call for nominations is now closed.

The winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022 will be announced on June 8, 2022. All nominees will of course be contacted by the conference organizers.  

Criteria

The candidate must have conducted his/her bioinformatics or systems biology research primarily in a Dutch institute. The primary result on which the award will be based will be the PhD thesis written by the candidate. Therefore, the final version of the thesis of the candidate should have been submitted to the PhD reading committee at the candidate's university on March 28, 2022 at the latest.

Other criteria that might be considered by the award committee are:

• The candidate significantly contributed to the idea of the research;
• The research of the candidate resulted in novel or improved bioinformatics or systems biology methodologies;
• The research of the candidate advanced life sciences research;
• The candidate independently conducted the research;
• The research resulted in a scientific publication, software application or database;
• The work of the candidate has given broad visibility of bioinformatics or systems biology in the life sciences field;
• The candidate has otherwise significantly contributed to bioinformatics/systems biology or the bioinformatics/systems biology community in the Netherlands.

Procedure

Each nomination must be accompanied with:

• Name and affiliation of candidate
• Motivation for nomination by group leader of candidate
• Curriculum Vitae of the candidate
• A URL to the final version of the PhD thesis (preferably to the PDF of the printed version)

Award committee

The 2022 members of the award committee are:

• Sergio Martinez Cuesta, Astrazeneca/CRUK Cambridge (LinkedIn)
• Michiel Adriaens, MaCSBio, University of Maastricht (ORCID)
• Marten Postma, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS), University of Amsterdam (ORCID)
• Halima Mouhib, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (LinkedIn)
   

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Last year's award winner: Joske Ubels 

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021 unanimously chose for Joske Ubels as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021.

Read more
 

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