The BSD Chicago Fellows Program is an internationally competitive postdoctoral fellowship program supporting the career advancement of exceptional and creative postdoctoral scientists. We are pleased to announce that this year’s fellowships have been awarded to the following group of early-career researchers:
Chicago Fellows
- Ondrej Maxian will be joining the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology this summer, following completion of his Ph.D. in Mathematics from New York University. Under the mentorship of Ed Munro, Ondrej will be working at the interface of theory and experimentation building mathematical models to precisely dissect the mechanisms of cell polarization in the early C. elegans embryo. Ondrej is supported in partnership with the Institute of Biophysical Dynamics Yen Fellowship program as our first Chicago-Yen Fellow.
- Elyse Parker will be joining the Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy this summer after completing her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Yale University. She is joining Mark Westneat’s group where her research focus will be the diversification of Antarctic notothenioid fishes. Her work will broaden our understanding of how extremophile marine fishes have evolved in response to changes in their environment, and therefore, enable prediction of how they might continue to adapt in the face of climate change.
- Jingwen Si completed her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Tsinghua University in August 2020 and is currently continuing her research there as a postdoctoral scholar, which has already led to two clinical trials. She will be joining the University of Chicago this spring to work with Chuan He (Department of Chemistry) and Ralph Weichselbaum (Department of Radiation & Cellular Oncology). She plans to identify pathways of CAR-NK dysfunction in tumor microenvironments and use that knowledge to optimize natural killer (NK) cell therapies for cancer.
Duchossois Family Institute (DFI) Fellows
- Bum-Joon Jung completed his Ph.D. in Nanoscience and Technology from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His University of Chicago co-mentors are Oni Basu (Department of Medicine) and Supratik Guha (Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering). He will be leveraging his experience in designing microfluidic devices to develop the first fast and high throughput cell lysis platform that can break apart any kind of microbial cell without destroying the contents, thus enabling single-cell genomics of the microbiome.
- Natalia Cortes-Delgado will be joining the Department of Ecology & Evolution after completing her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Under the mentorship of Cara Brook, she will be investigating how bat gut microbiomes respond, and confer resistance, to viral infection. This work could lead to exciting applications, such as the development of microbiota-based prophylaxes to prevent illness in other species, including humans.
We congratulate the Fellows, and their faculty mentors, for this recognition, and welcome them to the University of Chicago.
