Five NIMBB students awarded prestigious international research prize internships

Five students at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (NIMBB) in UP Diliman will be spending part of their summer at prestigious research institutes in Switzerland, Germany and Taiwan.

After a three-round screening process, Marian Abigaile Manongdo was chosen as one of 20 international graduate students who will participate in this year’s Novartis Next Generation Scientist Program from June 1 to August 31 in Basel, Switzerland. The immersive internship is offered jointly by Novartis and the University of Basel and allows students to work on research projects with expert mentors in their field of interest. The three-month internship also incorporates a leadership development program to enhance the decision-making, communication and presentation skills of the participants.

 

Carmela Rieline Cruz and Arman Ghodsinia will spend two months (August to September) at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum or DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany to work on cutting-edge cancer research. They are two of only twenty or less accepted by DKFZ each year. Like the Next-Generation Scientist Program of Novartis, the DKFZ Summer Internship includes professional development courses on scientific presentations and communication.

J-Ann Marie Lego was chosen as one of this year’s interns under the International Internship Program of the Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP-IIP). TIGP is supported by Academia Sinica, the most prestigious research institution in Taiwan. Ms. Lego will join Jose Gabriel Hilario who will also do an internship in Academia Sinica from July-August, as part of his prize during the 2017 Youth Science Forum at the Philippine Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s Annual Convention.

Manongdo, Cruz, Ghodsinia and Lego are MS MBB students while Hilario is a senior undergraduate. This brings to six the total of international prize internships awarded to NIMBB students this year. Ryan Timothy Yu, the 2017 winner of the Sanger Institute Prize, is currently on a 3-month internship at The Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. All six students are from the Disease Molecular Biology and Epigenetics Laboratory.

Source: REYNALDO L. GARCIA, PhD MPhil (cantab)