Four Early-Career Researchers From RWTH to Attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
RWTH researchers Dr. Aqeela Imamdin, Dr. Amit Khurana, Dr. Carolina V. C. Junho, and Dr. Ravichandran Rajkumar have been selected to participate in the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, scheduled to be held from June 25 to June 30, 2023. At the high-profile event, 635 students, doctoral candidates, and postdocs from all over the world will meet and discuss with about 40 Nobel laureates.
The Lindau Meeting has been held since 1951, and its key topic alternates annually between the three disciplines of physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. Early-career researchers who are invited to the Lindau Meeting have passed a highly competitive multi-stage selection process. Applicants must not be older than 35 years. Those who are invited are considered to represent the next generation of leading scientists and remain members of the network of excellence of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
Dr. Aqeela Imamdin completed her Ph.D. in medicine at the University of Cape Town in 2018. Over the next two years, the early-career researcher at the Institute for Molecular Cardiovascular Research at Uniklinik RWTH Aachen, who has received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for postdocs, will conduct research in Dr. Emiel van der Vorst's group on “The role of serotonin in atherosclerosis-related inflammatory responses.”
Dr. Amit Khurana's research focuses on mechanistic targeting of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Since August 2021, Dr. Amit Khurana has been working as a senior researcher and DAAD PRIME Fellow at the Institute of Molecular Pathobiochemistry, Experimental Gene Therapy, and Clinical Chemistry at RWTH. He is also a visiting researcher at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Dr. Carolina V. C. Junho, who completed her doctorate in 2022 in São Paulo, Brazil, studies cardiac remodeling in acute kidney injury using a combination of cellular and molecular analyses and animal models. Funded by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, the postdoctoral researcher at Uniklinik RWTH Aachen is currently investigating the role of neutrophils and neutrophil extracellular traps (NET) in uremic cardiomyopathy.
Dr. Ravichandran Rajkumar received a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering from Anna University of Technology Tirunelveli, India, in 2012 and a master's degree in biomedical engineering from FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences in 2015. In 2022, he completed his doctorate at RWTH’s Faculty of Medicine. The postdoctoral researcher at Uniklinik RWTH Aachen is currently involved in projects investigating treatment outcome in psychiatric patients using ultrahigh-field MR imaging with functional MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Among other projects, with the help of a START grant from Uniklinik, he is investigating the possibilities of measuring functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)/EEG at the patient bedside to determine the response to treatment of psychiatric patients.