2019 Science & SciLifeLab Winners

GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Longzhi Tan
Longzhi Tan received his undergraduate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He started his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 2019. His research combines single-cell genomics and opto-genetics to study the 3D chromatin basis of neurodevelopment and behaviors and to develop new tools for chromatin biology.
Read his grand prize winning essay here.

CATEGORY WINNER: ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT
Barbara Klump
Barbara Klump received her master’s degree from Heidelberg University, Germany, and a Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, UK. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St. Andrews, she moved to the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, where she is currently a postdoc in the Cognitive and Cultural Ecology Lab. Her research explores how a species’s ecology shapes its behavioral repertoire.
Read her prize winning essay here.

CATEGORY WINNER: MOLECULAR MEDICINE
Humsa Venkatesh
Humsa Venkatesh received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is currently completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research combines principles of neuroscience and cancer biology to understand the electrical components of cancer pathophysiology and harness these malignant dependencies for therapeutic intervention.
Read her prize winning essay here.

CATEGORY WINNER: CELL AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
Zibo Chen
Zibo Chen received his undergraduate degree from the National University of Singapore and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Washington. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, where he is programming mammalian cells using proteins designed from scratch.
Read his prize winning essay here.