Inaugural Postdoctoral Researcher Medal Winner 2021
Agathe Chaigne
Agathe Chaigne is a sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London. She studied in cell and developmental 
biology in Paris, first at Ecole Normale Superieure, then at Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Fostered by her interest in cell division and biophysics, she received her PhD for studying the role of actin-mediated mechanical properties in asymmetric divisions of the mouse oocyte and embryo with Marie-Emilie Terret and Marie-Helène Verlhac at the Collège de France. For this work, she won a PhD prize from Le Monde and an early career award from the Fondation Bettencourt-Schueller.
She then moved to London to investigate the role of cell division in fate transitions using mouse embryonic stem cells as a model system under the superv
ision of Ewa Paluch. There, she received an EMBO fellowship and a sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship, and discovered a key role for the last step of division, abscission, in regulating exit from naive pluripotency. In her own lab, she is planning on investigating the mechanisms and roles of abscission modulation in multicellular animals.
You can follow Agathe @AgChaigne on Twitter. The medal will be awarded at a virtual medal lecture during the next joint BSCB/Biochemical Society meeting, Dynamic Cell IV which will be held on 14-19 March 2021.
The Postdoc medal was established in 2020 to recognise early career researchers who have made a major contribution to UK/Ireland Cell Biology during their postdoctoral training. You can read more about the medal here.
You can see Agathe’s medal talk here.