After remote starts and quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Elise Bornet (France), Sebastian Zielinski (Germany) and Marco Olguin (Mexico) have just begun their PhD journey at HIRI.
Elise joins us from the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnolgie Strasbourg (ESBS) where she graduated with a MSc in Biotechnology and High Throughput Data Analysis. For her Master’s thesis, she worked at New England Biolabs characterizing novel Cas9 proteins.
Sebastian is originally from Munich and stayed in the city to obtain his BSc and MSc degrees in Biochemistry from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Beyond developing a strong background in virology, Sebastian worked at the Munich-based Ethris GmbH to pursue his Master’s thesis project on the chromatography-based purification of mRNA for the use as a transcript therapeutic.
Marco has taken on the farthest journey among the three: He graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM) with a MSc degree in Biochemistry.
There, he studied the host-rotavirus interactions, in particular the innate immune response and viral translation. After an internship at Heidelberg University working on alternative mechanisms of flavivirus translation he now joins HIRI’s Graduate Training program.
All three will now rotate through three labs of their choice at HIRI before settling on a group and project to pursue their PhD at the interface of RNA & infection.
Our warmest welcome to Elise, Sebastian and Marco.
See you around!
