SBI Welcomes Two New Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellows
SBI is pleased to announce the awarding of prestigious Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Fellowships to Dr Ariane Watson and Dr Oleksii Rukhlenko. These highly competitive awards support experienced researchers in their research training and career development.
Ariane joins SBI under the TOPMed10 Marie Sk?odowska-Curie COFUND programme led by Prof. Walter Kolch and will be working with Walter and Dr Colm Ryan investigating the role of epigenetics in modulating drug resistance in melanoma, through molecular crosstalk with the signaling pathways frequently altered in metastatic melanoma. Originally from South Africa but brought up in Ireland, Ariane completed her Irish Research Council-funded PhD in UCD in 2016 under the supervision of Dr Gerard Cagney including two years with Prof. Nevan Krogan in University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Oleksii has been awarded an MSCA Individual Fellowship to study Signal Transduction Networks (STN) and the connection between environment and cell responses. Using data-driven network reconstruction and model development, his research will seek to to understand how STN 'compute' cell fate decisions depending on genetic background. It is anticipated that the developed mechanistic dynamical models will explain and predict mechanisms of intrinsic and acquired drug resistances, which often cannot be picked up by only intuitive reasoning. Originally from Ukraine, Oleksii has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in SBI under the supervision of Prof. Boris Kholodenko since 2015 having previously completed his PhD in the lab of Prof. Georgy Guria, National Research Centre for Haematology & Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
