PhD student Richard Edel receives two travel awards
Earlier this month, second-year PhD student Richard Edel was awarded both the Struther Arnott Postgraduate Award and the St Leonard’s Postgraduate Travel Award . This funding will support a summer research trip to Bad Nauheim, Germany, where he will undertake a three-month internship at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research.
Hosted by Dr Pieterjan Dierickx, Richard will use this time to learn how to derive heart cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This will help Richard develop his work investigating the functional oligomerisation of a calcium channel protein suggested to play a role in the early stages of heart failure. The next step of his project will involve examining this channel in the human heart using stem cell technology (human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes or hiPSC-CMs).
Congratulations to Richard on this fantastic opportunity! It will not only advance his knowledge in a new area of science that he can bring back to St Andrews. It will also expand his scientific networks, hopefully leading to future collaboration opportunities.