By the end of February 2023, CenGen Project Lead Shannon Derman will be leaving us to spread her wings to Europe. She has been selected as one of only eleven candidates in the world for a very prestigious PhD-position offered by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral EpiseedLink programme! The programme will focus on new ways to improve crop resilience under climate change threats. She will be under the supervision of Prof Ueli Grossniklaus at The University of Zürich, Switzerland.
Shannon joined the CenGen team in 2021, focusing on the wheat research projects. She soon developed a keen interest in bioinformatics and has spent valuable time with our collaborators at KAUST, Saudi Arabia and JIC, UK, to gain experience in genome sequence analysis as part of the Kariega and Spekboom projects, respectively. She has also played an instrumental part in establishing the genetics workshops for teachers and learners now hosted annually at CenGen.
Shannon will be dearly missed, and we are honoured that we could provide her with a work environment where she could thrive and develop her scientific career. We are tremendously proud of what she has achieved and grateful for all the knowledge and experience that she has contributed to our group. We wish her all the best in her future endeavours, which we know she will make a success of, and we look forward to collaborating with Doctor Derman in the future!
