The Avril McDonald Prize for Fabiola Puertolas-Balint

On December 24 2019 our student Fabiola Puertolas-Balint was awarded the Avril McDonald Prize for excellent Master research in the field of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The title of her Master thesis was: "Whole Genome Sequence analysis of Aspergillus fumigatus clinical isolates”. Fabiola finished her master with distinction. She is first author on a paper in Frontiers in Microbiology ( Front Microbiol. 2019 Sep 4;10:1970. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2019.01970. eCollection 2019) . Currently, Fabiola performs her PhD studies at the University Umea, Sweden; her focus lies on the host-microbiome interactions.

Details about the Avril McDonald Memorial Fund:  It aims “to encourage promising young female scientists to pursue an academic career. The fund is an initiative of the Rosalind Franklin Fellows of the university of Groningen and is a memorial to Avril McDonald, a Rosalind Franklin Fellow that unexpectedly passed away at the age of 44 years. She embodied the qualities that the Rosalind Franklin Fellowship program stands for: excellence in research, a passion for her subject, and a commitment to teaching others”.