Katarzyna Walendzik, a PhD student in the Regenerative Biology Group, received a prestigious scholarship from the Foundation for Polish Science.

The START program of the Foundation for Polish Science is the oldest scholarship program in Poland for the best young scientists from all fields of science. It supports outstanding young researchers and encourages them to further scientific development. The competition assesses the quality of the candidates’ academic achievements to date.

The „100” of researchers awarded this year were selected from among 1,034 candidates.

The full list of START 2021 winners is available here.

Katarzyna Walendzik is a PhD student at the Department of Biological Functions of Food in the Regenerative Biology Group led by Prof. Barbara Gawrońska-Kozak. In the research carried out as part of her doctoral dissertation, she showed for the first time that the activity of the transcription factor Foxn1 regulates the diet-induced susceptibility to obesity and indicated the molecular basis for the involvement of Foxn1 in the adipogenic potential of skin cells.

Outstanding research results prompted her to further investigate this topic and prepare her own research project entitled „The role of the epidermal transcription factor Foxn1 in the modulation and regulation of intradermal fat cells (dWAT)”, which received funding from the National Science Center in the Preludium 16 competition.

Katarzyna Walendzik is the co-author of 8 publications and 14 conference presentations presented at congresses in Europe and the USA, and a graduate of two international internships at Tulane University School of Medicine, USA and Genome Editing Core, Biocity, Turku, Finland.

The award received by Ms Katarzyna Walendzik is all the more significant since, as mentioned by the FNP awarding Committee, „this year the candidates represented a very high academic level”.