This year, the award ceremony took place as part of the grand Robert Koch Prize ceremony in Berlin on November 8. Lucie Loyal (Immunology) and Matthias Gröschel (Microbiology) are among the three post-doctoral award winners in 2024.
Honor and motivation for outstanding young researchers
Dr. rer. nat. Lucie Loyalfrom the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) receives the Robert Koch Foundation's Post-doctoral Award for Immunology 2024. Her research focus is the immunocompetence and immune responses in humans. She is the first author of two scientific publications in Nature and Science that have shown that many people were already protected from severe courses of disease by immunity to other coronaviruses. “It was a very rewarding experience during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to identify and characterize cellular cross-immunity together with colleagues from different professions and thus directly contributing to a better understanding of population immunity. The Robert Koch Prize now honors the result of a fantastic team effort and motivates us to continue breaking new ground in research. As a deaf person, for me this also includes combining cutting-edge research with the removal of barriers so that young scientists can develop their full potential regardless of their background,” says Loyal.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34465633/, DOI: 10.1126/science.abh1823
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32726801/, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2598-9
Dr. Matthias Gröschel from the Specialty Network Infectious Diseases and Respiratory Medicine at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and alumnus of the BIH Charité Junior Digital Clinician Scientist Program receives the Post-doctoral Award for Hygiene and Microbiology 2024 for his research on tuberculosis. Using the example of the tuberculosis pathogen, he developed a program for predicting antibiotic resistance using machine learning and investigated the different transmission rates of the individual genetic lines of the pathogen. Gröschel is also delighted with the award: “I am very happy about this prize, which recognizes my work on antibiotic resistance and transmission rates of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is still the infectious disease with the highest mortality rate worldwide and receives far too little attention. The award will help me to start further projects on this disease in my small research group.”
More information on the Robert Koch Foundation at: https://www.robert-koch-stiftung.de/en/