At this year’s Vienna BioCenter PhD Symposium, held under the theme “Bringing it all back Home” and celebrating Vienna BioCenter alumni, exceptional young scientists were recognised for their doctoral achievements across diverse research fields.
Congratulations to Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández (Dagdas lab, GMI), Max Kellner (Penninger lab, IMBA), Irene Schwartz (Versteeg lab, Max Perutz Labs) and Robert Kalis (Zuber lab, IMP)!
Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández from the Gregor Mendel Institute (GMI) was presented with one of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Awards 2025 for is work in Yasin Dagdas’s lab which focused on the mechanistic characterization of selective autophagy receptors (SARs).
Through his thesis entitled “Leveraging evolutionary diversity to discover new autophagy mechanisms in plants”, Víctor (and colleagues) developed a powerful screening pipeline to identify SARs. Through a cross-species analysis, he went on to discover a highly conserved SAR in plants, CESAR, and characterized its critical role in the degradation of protein aggregates under conditions compromising protein homeostasis, such as heat stress. These findings are now accepted in Developmental Cell.
Read more here
Max Kellner, a former PhD student in the lab of Josef Penninger at the Institute of Molecular Biotechology (IMBA), received the award for his innovative work on zoonotic viruses and bat-derived organoids.
Kellner’s PhD work in the lab of Josef Penninger at IMBA explored how dangerous zoonotic viruses—such as Marburg virus and SARS-CoV-2—emerge from natural reservoirs like bats. In his thesis, “Preparing for Future Pandemics: Rapid Virus Identification in Resource-Limited Settings and Modeling Zoonotic Virus Infections in Natural Reservoir Species,” he developed bat-derived organoids to investigate why bats can carry highly pathogenic viruses without falling ill. His findings, published in Nature Immunology, revealed fundamental differences in antiviral immunity between bats and humans, particularly in mucosal tissues, offering insights into why bats remain resilient to infections that cause severe disease in humans.
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Irene Schwartz (Versteeg lab) has been awarded the Vienna BioCenter PhD Award for her exceptional doctoral research on how cells maintain immune balance through controlled proteasomal degradation.
During her PhD, Irene explored how cells use the proteasome, the cellular machinery responsible for breaking down proteins, to regulate crucial immune factors. Using CRISPR/Cas9 genetic screening, she and her co-authors identified several E3 ligases – enzymes that tag specific proteins for degradation – that control the stability of immune modulators such as IRF1, and APOBEC3 enzymes. These proteins play vital roles in antiviral defense and inflammation control but must be precisely regulated to avoid harmful consequences like inflammatory syndromes or DNA damage.
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Robert Kalis, a former PhD student in Johannes Zuber’s lab at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), received the award for his groundbreaking work on how cancer cells adapt to the harsh conditions within tumours.
In his PhD work, Robert Kalis studied how cancer cells adapt to the complex stresses of the tumour environment. Working jointly with Wilhelm Palm’s lab at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), he helped discover how acidosis—a drop in pH caused by metabolic byproducts—acts as a master regulator of cancer metabolism. The team showed that acidosis triggers mitochondrial fusion, enabling cancer cells to shift from sugar-burning to a more efficient, oxygen-based mode of energy production, enhancing their resilience to multiple stresses. These findings reshape our understanding of tumour metabolism and allow researchers to search for therapies under more realistic conditions, exploring new ways to break this resilience.
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