The Health Science Platform at Tianjin University is proud to have five students who were successful in receiving a China Scholarship Council (CSC) for their PhD studies abroad. The students are on their way to Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, and USA.
Professor Robert Borris, Vice Dean, said that "these students have truly been superb students during their years in our labs, and their supervisors and I are very proud of their achievements”.
The CSC Scholarship is a prestigious and competitive scholarship offered by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China.
Congratulations to the students. We wish them every success in their future endeavors.
Ms Xinhui Wang was supervised by Professor Robert Borris during her Master's degree. Xinhui will be doing her PhD studies at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). DTU is one of the highest ranked technical universities in Europe. The overall aim of Xinhui's project is to discover novel bioactive natural products from previously silent biosynthetic pathways from fungal species belonging to genus theAspergillus. The project outcome will be twofold since it will generate both new basic insights into secondary metabolism, as well as bioactive compounds with potentially novel and unique chemical scaffolds, that may form the basis for future drugs.
Ms Yang Fan and Ms Liu Lingyu were supervised by Professor Matthias Bureik and they will be studying their PhDs in Drug Metabolism and Bioanalysis in a research collaboration between Prof. Dr. Maria Kristina Parr at Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) in Germany, and Prof. Matthias Bureik at Tianjin University's School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology. FUB is one of the eleven universities to have been successful in all three lines of funding in the German government's Excellence Initiative in 2012.
Ms Xiaojuan Zhang was supervised by Professor Jian Sun. Her PhD at The University of Groningen, The Netherlands, will focus on using the obtained biochemical and structural data to design and characterize LRRK2 stapled peptide allosteric regulators. These peptides will serve as excellent tools to study the function of LRRK2 activationin vivo, probe the significance of LRRK2 monomerization versus dimerization in intact cells, and can potentially serve as templates for therapeutic agents or assist in target validation. The University of Groningen is a research university with a rich academic tradition dating back to 1614. Today, it is one of the top 100 universities in the world.
Ms Min Gao was supervised by Professor Zheng Wang and Associate Professor Yanjun Zhao and she will be a jointPhD student with the City of Hope National Medical Center in California, USA. Founded in 1913, City of Hope is one of only 49 comprehensive cancer centers in the nation, as designated by the National Cancer Institute. Min will be developing small-molecule inhibitors or microRNA-carrying nanoparticles which can selectively target cancer-related RNA/DNA epigenetic modifiers or other cancer-causing genes to effectively treat acute myeloid leukemia.
