Dec 2020: Postdoctoral EMBO fellowships awarded to ISMB postdoc Sander Van der Verren and former ISMB PhD student Joshua Hutchings.
ISMB’s Sander Van der Verren has been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive EMBO fellowship to work at ISMB in Giulia Zanetti’s laboratory. The fellowship will support structural studies of the human COPII coat complex and its regulatory factors. COPII mediates vesicular transport of proteins out of the Endoplasmic Reticulum, and its regulation in humans is important for secretion of a wide range of cargoes, including the most abundant secretory proteins: collagens. As part of the Birkbeck cryo-EM lab, Sander will use cryo-tomography and single particle cryo-EM techniques to understand how regulatory factors TANGO1 and cTAGE5 assemble and interact with the coat to promote collagen secretion.
Sander says: “I am honoured to have been awarded an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship and look forward to tackle outstanding questions in the membrane trafficking field.”
A Zanetti lab recent alumnus, Josh Hutchings, was also successful in securing an EMBO fellowship. His postdoctoral studies in Elizabeth Villa’s lab at UC San Diego will focus on in situ characterisation of the LNK complex.