September 5, 2022
Anđela Šarić wins Vallee Scholars Award
New ISTA faculty member is among six winners of the international award recognizing young interdisciplinary scientists working in the biomedical sciences
ISTA is proud to announce that Anđela Šarić, Assistant Professor and most recent member of its faculty, is one of the six winners of the 2022 Vallee Scholars Award. In 2019, ISTA became part of an exclusive list of top international institutes eligible to nominate just one candidate each for a Vallee Scholar Award. It comes comes with a grant of USD 340,000. Anđela Šarić is ISTA’s first winner.
This year’s Vallee Scholars Award recognizes Anđela Šarić’ work on cell division and repair that stands to open doors in cell biology and developmental biology. As a true interdisciplinary researcher, her work borders biology, chemistry, physics, and also computation. Šarić describes the biomedical potential of her upcoming work as such: “The in-depth understanding of cell reshaping principles that my research will provide can allow us to design therapeutics for the cases when these processes go wrong and lead to diseases. It can also instruct us on how to reproduce such processes in laboratory to make artificial tissues and smart bio-materials.”
She is now part of the global Vallee Community along with other winners Stephanie Ellis, affiliated with the University of Vienna; Mackenzie Mathis at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL); Peter H. Sudmant at the Integrative Biology at the University of California Berkeley; Shigeki Watanabe at the Johns Hopkins University; and Lu Wie at the California Institute of Technology.
In June next year, the incoming cohort of winners will join existing Vallee scholars at the next Vallee Scholars Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, for scientific discussions and presentations. The Vallee Foundation is committed to developing interdisciplinary sciences related to human health. About its award the US based Foundation says that, “recognizing that outstanding, young, independent investigators are the source for future advances in the biomedical sciences and of their need for flexible, unrestricted funding to conduct their research, the Vallee Scholars program makes grants of $340,000 – to be spent over a period of four years – to junior faculty carrying out basic biomedical research.”
Here is an interview with Anđela Šarić exploring her research and philosophy in more detail:
