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The second day of the IMP-IMBA Recess was kicked off by the presentation of the Kirsten Peter Rabitsch Award to IMBA alumna Julia Batki. Every year, the award honours the most promising PhD-student of either institute, chosen after careful consideration by the Scientific Advisory Board. Julia, who was a student in the Vienna BioCenter PhD Programme, received the accolade from Hermann Rabitsch, followed by a presentation of her PhD work. 

The Kirsten Peter Rabitsch Award is named after a brilliant young scientist who passed away shortly after completing his PhD in the lab of Kim Nasmyth. The prize, which is worth 2,000 Euros, was installed in 2006 by the IMP and Kirsten’s family who are sponsoring it to this day and take an active interest in the awardees and their research. The award is a continuing tribute to Kirsten’s outstanding personality and talent and an inspiration for aspiring young scientists at our institute. 

Julia Batki, who studied chemistry at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, first got in touch with the Vienna BioCenter through the 2013 Summer School. For her PhD, she later joined the group of Julius Brennecke at IMBA. In March of this year, she successfully defended her thesis  „Nuclear small RNA-guided silencing of transposable elements in Drosophila melanogaster“. Her PhD work was recently published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, DOI 10.1038/s41594-019-0270-6.

"I spent a wonderful four and a half years at the Vienna BioCenter", Julia said during her talk. "I was very fortunate to have such great and talented people around me, it was a kick-start for my career."