Young i3S researcher wins ESHG Fellowship

Researcher Ana Rita Barbosa Matos was recently honored at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society of Human Genetics (SPGH) with the ESHG National Fellowship Award 2018 for her presentation on “Intronic cis-regulatory elements regulate CDH1 gene expression and function”.

For the young researcher Ana Rita Barbosa Matos, receiving this scholarship at the 22nd Annual Meeting of SPGH represents “a great honor”. “It is undoubtedly a stimulus for my personal and scientific development, so I thank the ESGH for the award of this award, as well as the scientific committee of the SPGH for having selected me”, she adds.

Senior author of the paper, Carla Oliveira, stresses the importance of rewarding new work that involves a great team of researchers, in addition to the “mastery and motivation that Rita demonstrated in the presentation, which went very well!”. “It's great to have a young researcher representing our group and our work at ESHG”, he added.

The ESHG National Fellowship is the responsibility of the European Society of Human Genetics and is awarded annually to a researcher under the age of 35 who is a member of SPGH and has distinguished themselves by showing excellence in the field of human genetics. This prize will finance registration, travel and accommodation at the next meeting of the ESHG, which will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, in June 2019, to present their work.

Ana Rita Barbosa Matos has just defended her Master's degree in Medicine and Molecular Oncology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto and developed her research in the i3S group “Expression Regulation in Cancer”, under the guidance of Carla Oliveira and Anabela Ferro. This work aims to uncover the role of intronic cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of CDH1 gene expression, since alterations in the exons of this gene do not explain all phenotypes of loss of gene function.