Britt Hanson, of the Wood research group, and Dr Lukas Krone, of the Vyazovskiy and Molnár research groups, have each won a 2020 Goodger and Schorstein Award from the Medical Sciences Internal Fund. Applications were received from many deserving candidates and the awards will contribute towards their living expenses in the year of their DPhil programmes after they have confirmed their status.
Britt was funded by the DPAG and the Clarendon Fund for the first three years of her DPhil, and Lukas was funded by the Wellcome Trust for his MSc in Neuroscience and the first three years of his DPhil.
Britt is currently finalising her DPhil under the supervision of Professor Matthew Wood and Dr Thomas Roberts, working on developing novel gene editing strategies for neuromuscular disease therapy. In a recent publication (Coenen-Stass, et al. 2019), Britt helped contribute towards understanding the protective potential of naturally-derived particles from cells, otherwise known as exosomes, on extracellular RNAs with therapeutic potential.
Britt is now pioneering the introduction of Green Impact solutions through the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) in her lab and the Le Gros Clark building as a whole, in an effort to encourage more sustainable lab practice while making it easy and desirable for her colleagues and other DPAG members to participate. Britt is also one of the organisers of the next Genome Engineering Oxford forum meeting to be held in May this year, where meaningful discussion around an array of genome engineering projects being undertaken by students and post-doctoral researchers at the University of Oxford will be facilitated and encouraged. In her spare time, Britt also works in the Exeter College bar and has played hockey for the college during her DPhil.
Lukas’s research aims at understanding the interaction of global and local sleep regulatory mechanisms. His first project, which revealed that the cortex plays a previously unknown role in sleep-wake regulation, has been recognised with several poster prizes and a preprint is available on BioRxiv. Building on this novel finding, Lukas currently explores sleep-related neuronal dynamics across cortical areas and the interaction of cortex with subcortical sleep regulatory circuitry.
During the first two years of his DPhil, Lukas was president of the Cortex Club organising a broad range of neuroscience events across university departments. Outside of science, Lukas is a passionate rower, cyclist, and mountaineer.