Student Scholarship 2021

During the three months of a research project for my master’s in biomedicine in the lab of Prof. Dr. Matthias von Herrath at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, I’ll be studying the effects of metabolic stress and different pro-inflammatory cytokines, that have been associated with Type 1 Diabetes, on three different platforms for human pancreatic islets: slices from donor pancreas, isolated human islets and human islets organoids.

I am currently pursuing a master’s degree in Animal Behavior at the UZH. To broaden my practical skills, I decided to do a master’s thesis that includes hands-on work with habituated meerkats as part of the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa. My aim is to investigate if variations in stress hormone levels can explain the patterns in the sentinel calls of meerkats. This will be done by recording alarm calls of the meerkats and extracting glucocorticoids from collected feces samples.

I am currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Medical Physics. To finish my degree, I will stay in Aarhus, Denmark to write my thesis at the University hospital. I will work with data from radio therapy on lung cancer patients. The purpose of my project is to develop markerless segmentation of the primary tumour in the cine MV images recorded during treatment and use this to determine the tumour position during treatment delivery.