Dr Roser Vento-Tormo, Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, is one of the ten researchers to have been honoured in the 2021 Biochemical Society Awards. These prestigious awards recognise excellence and achievement by eminent scientists and by researchers in the early stages of their career.
“I am thrilled to receive the Early Career Research Award from the Biochemical Society, which recognises the work of my superb team and collaborators. Together, we combine computational and experimental expertise to define novel cell identities, their regulation and their functional role in health and disease. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my nominators and mentors for their support during the early stages of my career as an independent investigator.”
Dr Roser Vento-Tormo, Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
Roser studies interactions between immune cells in reproductive organs and development. She has developed new computational methods to understand the signals that cells use to communicate with each other, and has used them to investigate maternal-fetal communication during early pregnancy. This is helping to understand women’s health and issues with reproduction. More broadly, CellPhoneDB has also been key to identifying cell-cell interactions mediating fundamental biological processes including hematopoiesis and the tumour microenvironment. Roser is also the coordinator of the Reproductive Network of the global Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative, bringing together researchers from all over the world.
The Early Career Research Awards recognise the impact of research carried out in the molecular biosciences by early career scientists, with no more than six years postdoctoral research experience. There were two winners of this award for 2021: Dr Roser Vento-Tormo and Dr Kirsty Wan from the University of Exeter.
The Society received a large number of nominations for the 2021 Awards, and the winners were agreed by a judging panel of respected scientists, from across a range of different scientific areas.
As part of the award, Roser will deliver an Award Lecture at a 2021 Biochemical Society meeting, and is invited to submit an article to one of the Society’s publications.