Two PhD students win inaugural Qiagen prize

Two PhD students at the University of Melbourne's Department of Microbiology and Immunology were today awarded cash prizes towards travel to an international conference by life science company Qiagen.

Rhys Allan and Angus Stock received cheques of $1500 and $600 respectively, to go towards expenses already outlaid by the students in travelling to a Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) conference held earlier this year in San Diego.

This is on top of travel money already given to the students by their department. However, the department's grants were not able to cover all expenses and "it's great that industry could help out" said department head Prof Roy Robins-Browne.

"Going to my first international conference was absolutely life changing," he said. "I hope this award will be the first of an annual event."

Both students were supervised by Francis Carbone, and their PhDs examined mechanisms of immune system action.

"Rhys's work showed us new ways that T cells respond," said Qiagen managing director Duncan Jones. "T cell immunity is generated following infection, and Angus's work focused on the initiation response of CD8+ T cells following viral infection."

Allan said he had received a "positive" response to his work at the FASEB conference. Stock said that: "It was very worthwhile to be able to intimately discuss our work with international scientists who lead the field."

Allan's research has been published in Science, and he is now choosing between job offers from the Institute for Cancer Research in London and the Curie Institute in Paris. Stock's research was published last year in the Journal of Immunology, and he has been offered a postdoctoral research position in immunology at Oxford University.