Each year, the Fondation du Pélican, under the aegis of Fondation de Luxembourg, awards a number of doctoral candidates affiliated with the systems and molecular biomedicine programme of the Doctoral School in Science and Engineering (DSSE) at the University of Luxembourg with the “Pelican Grant”. This grant may be used for research expenses, such as costs for additional experiments or travel expenses to participate in conferences and training workshops, as well as to finance short-term stays abroad in the context of research collaborations.

Congratulations to the 2020 grant recipients: 
 

• Mohaned Benzarti  (LIH & University of Luxembourg)

Research topic: Investigate whether serine catabolism is important for cellular function under nutrient stress conditions during the process of tumorigenesis. Improve the understanding of the bioenergetics to treat the cancer cells.
 

• Eleftheria Charalambous (LIH & University of Luxembourg)

Research topic: Early-life adversity (ELA) is a risk factor for many non-communicable diseases. Using the EpiPath cohort, examine how ELA affects the establishment of the microbiome in early life, and treating changes in the microbiome, immune system and epigenome visible many years later in a holistic, integrative manner. 
 

• Erica Grant (LIH & University of Luxembourg)

Research topic: Understanding the effects of dietary fiber-deprivation on host health, mainly through gnotobiotic mouse models. 
 

• Dimitrios Kyriakis (LCSB)

Research topic: Understanding of the critical brain developmental states of mid-gestation by associating cell-type specific expression profiles with distinct disease risks, thanks to the application of the recent technology of single-cell multi-omics data. 
 

• Beatriz Garcia Santa Cruz (CHL)

Research topic: Development of solutions for the automatic analysis of biomedical images with Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies. 

2020 Pelican grant recipients from left to right: Beatriz Garcia Santa Cruz from Spain who works at the Hospital Centre of Luxembourg (CHL), Dimitrios Kyriakis from Greece who works at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and Eleftheria Charalambous, Erica Grant and Mohaned Benzarti respectively from Cyprus, USA and Libya who work together at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH).

Learn more about the 2020 Pelican grant recipients here.