Cândida Cardoso, a second-year doctoral student in biomedical sciences at University of Algarve (Portugal), won in the first international SEA-EU Falling Walls Lab, held on July 7 at University of Split’s School of Medicine.
Cardoso won with her presentation titled “Breaking the Wall of Early Breast Cancer Detection.” Her research focuses on cancer epigenetics and she is currently developing an approach that uses epigenetic markers for early detection of breast cancer from one blood sample.
Among eight finalists from Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Norway, the expert jury judged her presentation to be the best, earning her a spot at Falling Walls Lab global final, which will take place in November in Berlin. As the winner of the first joint SEA-EU competition, she will represent the entire Alliance among best young researchers in the world.
Second place was awarded to Rajalekshmi Narayana Sarma for presentation “Breaking the Wall of Reproductive Inequality.” She is studying the evolution of meiosis and infertility.
Third place went to Zaira Zafroon with the topic “Breaking the Wall of Worldwide Data: A 180K Gut Metagenome Atlas.” Doctoral student at University of Kiel, originally from Bangladesh, she is researching the field of computational biology and global microbiome science.
The jury included: Prof. Katarina Vukojević Ph.D., Vice-deputy Dean for Science, International Cooperation, and Postgraduate Studies at School of Medicine, University of Split; Prof. Manuel Célio Conceição Ph.D., tenured professor and senior researcher at University of Algarve’s Centre for Art and Communication (CIAC), Portugal; Assoc. prof. Daniele Previtali Ph.D., professor of banking and finance at University of Parthenope in Naples, Italy; Umair Najeeb Mughal Ph.D., Senior advisor for European Projects, Community and Business Cooperation at University of Nord, Norway; and Anđela Prolić, MD, company director and Ph.D. student at School of Medicine, University of Zagreb.
SEA-EU Falling Walls Lab was held as part of the Science Comes to Town project, supported by the SEA-EU alliance, and part of the global Falling Walls initiative, which promotes development of innovative ideas and their effective communication as well as connecting young researchers from various scientific fields and countries.
