The GABBA community congratulates our alumni Ana Carvalho, Nuno Alves and Pedro Beltrao for being recently awarded with ERC starting grants. These highly competitive grants composed of 1.5 to 2 million Euros are designed to help the best european young investigators to establish a proper research team and to start conducting independent research in Europe.

Ana Carvalho participated in GABBA 3rd edition and recently moved from University of California San Diego to Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular at Porto (IBMC). Her research team is studying mechanisms of cell division using the nematode C. Elegans as model organism.

Nuno Alves from GABBA 4th edition joined IBMC in 2010, and he is interested in the study of the modulation of thymus function and how it can be manipulated for a better response during pathogenesis.

Pedro Beltrao is a member of GABBA 6th edition and his laboratory at EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, is interested in understanding how novel cellular functions arise and diverge during evolution using a combination of proteomics and system biology approaches.