Scientists from Łukasiewicz – PORT are winners of SONATA BIS!

Róża Szweda, Ph.D. Eng. and Agnieszka Krzyżosiak, Ph.D. are the laureate of the 11th edition of the prestigious SONATA BIS competition organized by the National Science Center. The winners received grants worth a total of over PLN 6 million.

SONATA BIS is a competition for projects aimed at establishing a new research team. Aimed at young scientists up to 12 years after their doctorate, who have the potential to lead their research team. In the 11th edition, 84 projects were awarded out of 382 applications, the total value of which exceeded PLN 200 million.

Róża Szweda, Ph.D. Eng., Leader of the Research Group of Functional Macromolecules, was recognized for the project “Polymers with sequential-programmable properties as next-generation materials for data archiving” [POLDIGIT]. The project aims to investigate polymeric materials in terms of their utility for data storage. The data will be encoded in a polymer sequence with the main goal of optimizing the polymer structure to be easy to read. The project is a response to the growing problem of long-term preservation of huge amounts of data on storage media, in particular their archiving. POLDIGIT would make it possible to collect all data in 1 kg of material.

The second winner of SONATA BIS from Łukasiewicz – PORT is Agnieszka Krzyżosiak, Ph.D. Eng. from the Astrocyte Biology Research Group. Agnieszka Krzyżosiak is the leader of the project ” Identification of novel disease modifiers in Huntington’s disease: neuro-glia interactions in the patient-derived multidimentional model” [HD-multi-3D]. She will study Huntington’s disease and investigate the function of a selected group of genes to identify new and effective modulators of Huntington’s disease pathology. For this purpose, she will use models of direct reprogramming of somatic cells obtained from patients into nerve cells. The HD-multi-3D project will contribute to a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying Huntington’s disease and is an opportunity to discover new therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases.

This year, the list of SONATA BIS winners also includes Dorota Pierścińska, Ph.D. Eng. from Łukasiewicz Research Network – Institute of Microelectronics and Photonics.

Congratulations!