Prestigious PhD scholarship for Marcel Vieira Lara

Marcel Vieira Lara has won one of the PhD scholarships which the UMCG grants to excellent students in its top master programme Medical and Pharmaceutical Drug Innovation. The top master programme enables students to write their own PhD project and defend it for a scientific panel. The most successful students win a scholarship to actually perform the proposed PhD research.

Marcel’s project is entitled: A matter of fat: disentangling lipid-induced insulin resistance. He proposes to take a systems biology approach, combining computational modelling, mathematical theory, and quantitative experiments, to unravel the mechanism of fatty-acid-induced insulin resistance. It is well known that both signalling and metabolism contribute to this phenomenon. Marcel’s project will give insight into how these processes are integrated and together affect insulin-dependent glucose consumption. The resulting computational model may lead to novel intervention strategies to be tested in vivo.

Marcel will carry out his project in the Laboratory of Pediatrics under the supervision of Prof. Barbara Bakker.