KNAW Early Career Award for two UG researchers

UG researchers Francesca Rizzo and Diego Pereira-Martins have been awarded the Early Career Award by the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). The KNAW presents twelve of these awards to researchers at Dutch universities annually. The award is intended for young researchers with innovative, original research ideas. Rizzo researches how galaxies form and evolve over cosmic time, while Pereira-Martins investigates the mechanisms involved in leukaemia to improve patient outcomes.

The KNAW Early Career Awards, consisting of €15,000 which the awardees can use to invest in their own research career.

Francesca Rizzo

How did galaxies like our Milky Way form and evolve over cosmic time? To answer this, Francesca Rizzo studies how galaxies' three main building blocks have changed over billions of years. These are stars, gas, and dark matter. Her approach is to measure how gas moves within galaxies. Using some of the world's most powerful telescopes, she observes galaxies so distant that we see them as they were billions of years ago. The motion of their gas tells us how much matter each galaxy contains, both visible and dark. By comparing these observations with computer simulations and theoretical models, her group tests which physical processes give galaxies their shapes, and what galaxies can reveal about what dark matter is.

Diego Pereira-Martins

Haematologist Diego Pereira-Martins conducts research into leukaemia, a collective name for various types of cancer affecting the body’s blood cells. In patients with leukaemia, genetic mutations cause pathogenic abnormalities in the body’s production of blood cells. Pereira-Martins seeks to establish exactly how this works, by investigating how oncogenic and age-related signals reprogram transcriptional and metabolic networks during the progression of this illness. In doing so, he hopes to uncover the mechanisms involved in leukaemia and to identify therapeutic vulnerabilities that prevent leukemic transformation and improve patient outcomes.

More information

• Francesca Rizzo
• Diego Pereira-Martins