Winners of the 2007 L’Oreal UK Fellowships For Women In Science

The winners of the four 2007 L’Oreal UK Fellowships For Women In Science
were announced on 5 July 2007 at an awards ceremony in central London.  

Theresa Burt de Perera, University of Oxford, Zoology Dr Theresa Burt de Perera will use her 2007 L’Oréal UK Fellowship to support her research at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. Her work considers how fish are able to navigate efficiently whilst coping with the complexity of their three-dimensional environment. There is a widely held belief that fish have little or no cognitive capacity; Dr Theresa Burt de Perera’s research challenges this view. The ability to learn and remember the environment is fundamental for fish, helping them survive and reproduce by navigating efficiently, whilst coping with the added complexity of their three-dimensional environment. In comparison to other animals we know little about the mechanisms that fish use to navigate, particularly how they combine information from the horizontal and vertical components of space. Dr Burt de Perera aims to discover how fish map three-dimensional space -what they learn and how they act on this information. Dr Theresa Burt de Perera is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow and a Research Fellow in Keble College, Oxford. Prior to this she held the EPA Junior Research Fellowship, also at Keble College (2002-5). Her work deals with orientation in fish, overturning the commonly held view that fish have little cognitive capacity, and she has recently published a number of high profile research papers in this area. Her interest in spatial cognition in animals started during her DPhil at the University of Oxford (1998) and, after a career break, continued to a post-doctoral position in UNAM, Mexico (2000-2).

Seirian Sumner, Zoological Society of London, Evolutionary Biology / Behavioural Ecology Dr Seirian Sumner will use her 2007 L’Oréal UK Fellowship to support her research at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. Her research focuses on the molecular basis of a major evolutionary transition: from solitary to social living. Dr Seirian Sumner studies the evolution and maintenance of sociality, using social insects (bees, wasps and ants) as study organisms. Her primary interests are on the origins of sociality, the resolution of reproductive conflicts (e.g. who lays the eggs and why?) and the evolution of sterile castes. Much of her work has focused on the simplest insect societies, which reveal the key processes involved in the early stages of social evolution. her approach combines field experiments and behavioural observations, with gene-level analyses. During her L’Oréal UK Fellowship For Women In Science, Dr Sumner will examine how insect genomes are modified during the leap from solitary to social living. Dr Seirian Sumner has always had a deep fascination for the natural world, particularly in behavioural ecology. After studying Zoology as an undergraduate at University College London, she stayed there for her PhD work on reproductive conflicts in Malaysian hover wasps. In 2000, Dr Sumner started postdoctoral work at the Copenhagen University, studying social parasitism in Panamanian leafcutting ants. Following this she spent two years at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute examining the genes underlying caste determination in paper wasps. Since then, she has been based at the Zoological Society of London as a research fellow, continuing her work on social insects.

Araxi Urrutia Odabachian, Cardiff University, Genetics Dr Araxi Urrutia Odabachian will use her 2007 L’Oréal UK Fellowship to support her research at the Institute of Medical Genetics, Cardiff University. Repetitive elements occupy half of our genome and have been hypothesised to have a major role in gene regulation; Dr Urrutia Odabachian will investigate the impact of repetitive elements on gene activity genome-wide through comparative genomics analyses. Dr Araxi Urrutia Odabachian’s research is in the field of Human Genomics. She uses bioinformatics tools in the attempt to unravel the processes that have shaped the genome through time. Her results show that genes are optimised to minimise protein production costs to the cell. Dr Urrutia Odabachian has also found that gene order in the genome is not random as was previously thought but rather genes are sorted according to their levels of activity. Dr Araxi Urrutia Odabachian concluded her undergraduate studies at the National University of Mexico and McGill University, Canada. She then pursued a doctoral degree at the University of Bath under the supervision of Prof. Laurence Hurst. After graduation she took a postdoctoral position under the supervision of Dr Sudhir Kumar at Arizona State University. Since the birth of her son Dr Urrutia Odabachian has been largely out from research. She has been fortunate in obtaining the Biochemistry's Quayle and the Ede and Ravenscroft prizes and was also the recipient of the L’Oréal - Royal Institution Award to the Science Graduate Student of the Year 2003.

Anna Git, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, Oncology Dr Anna Git is the winner of the fourth, additional fellowship in 2007, co-funded by L’Oréal UK and the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, awarded specifically to women who are returning to scientific research following a career break. Dr Anna Git will use her 2007 L’Oréal UK Fellowship to support her research at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute. Her project aims to establish a simple, robust and reproducible platform for a genome-wide search for new cancer autoantigens and the evaluation of the corresponding circulating autoantibodies as biomarkers. Early diagnosis is of paramount importance to the subsequent prognosis, treatment, quality of life and ultimate survival of cancer patients. One of the earliest known markers of cancer are antibodies produced by the body itself, rendering them ideal candidates for routine non-invasive screens. Unfortunately, only a handful of autoantibodies has been described so far, and their discovery and validation for clinical purposes is a slow, laborious and expensive task. Dr Anna Git’s research project aims to harness microarray technology to identify the multitude of cancer autoantibodies and evaluate their suitability as clinical markers for routine population screens. Enthralled by Mother Nature from a very early age, Dr Anna Git later became particularly interested in the regulation of RNA metabolism in development and disease. Dr Git’s pursuit took her from a Bachelors and Masters in Hadassah Medical School through a PhD and postdoc at the Department of Biochemistry in Cambridge to her current position with Prof. Caldas at the Cambridge Research Institute, where they utilise genomic tools to study RNA in breast cancer. After a recent intermission, her attempts to tame Ayala (2 years old) and Opher (1 year old) convinced her to go back to cancer research and save humanity instead: a much easier challenge, all things considered.