In honor of the 2024 International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Fulbright Austria is proud to introduce you to three women in science who are currently US Fulbright students in Austria and recipients of the Fulbright-Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Award. The award is generously funded by the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation and supports full-time research/study grants in STEM disciplines and related fields. Keep reading to learn more about the exciting work that these three program participants are currently completing in labs across Austria.
International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2024
9 February 2024We'd like to introduce you to three current US Fulbright students working in STEM.
Jagienka Timek
2023–24 US Fulbright student
Medical University of Vienna
My research in plastic surgery focuses on peripheral nerve regeneration using spider silk, and our goal is to implant spider-silk conduits as guiding materials for nerve cells in cases of nerve injury and damage. The project I am working on specifically analyzes immune responses to spider silk in culture, and I find it very exciting! This experience has completely opened my eyes to how biology, material science, and immunology converge within medical fields, and it has challenged my critical-thinking skills and creativity to make things work. I am grateful to work in a highly collaborative environment with wonderful mentors that are always willing to help, even from other labs! To quote Bill Nye: Science rules.
Michaela Polley
2023–24 US Fulbright student
University of Klagenfurt
I am working with Andrei Asinowski at the University of Klagenfurt. We have a very small and close-knit department who eat lunch together every day, meet up in the evenings at least once a week, and are always there for one another. My research lies in the field of enumerative combinatorics and focuses on counting rectangulations that avoid a given pattern. A rectangulation is any way to divide a big rectangle into smaller rectangles such that you never have four rectangles meeting at a corner (all joints look like a T in some form). I am currently exploring rectangulations that avoid a standard T joint but allow sideways and upside down T joints. Counting such rectangulations is easily solved under weak equivalence, but is an open question under strong equivalence. This work has applications in circuit design and computational biology.
Laura Hankins
2023–24 US Fulbright student
University of Vienna
As a Fulbright-Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Award grantee, I have been working with the Molecular Drug Targeting research group at the University of Vienna. In this group, I have been working on the synthesis of molecules for a Langerhans cell-targeted system that is designed to deliver chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells more effectively. As a female researcher beginning medical school in the US this fall, my experiences in Austria so far have only bolstered my aspiration to become a physician-scientist focused on innovating chemotherapy drug delivery systems.