It has been announced that the winner of this year’s Leena Peltonen Prize for Excellence in Human Genetics, is Gosia Trynka, PhD, Immune Genomics Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. The prize is awarded to an outstanding young researcher in the field of human genetics, and honors the memory of Dr. Leena Peltonen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leena_Peltonen-Palotie), a world-renowned human geneticist from Finland who died in 2010 and who contributed greatly to the identification of genes for human diseases. The prize is to be presented during the ESHG 2020 53rd annual meeting being held entirely online June 6-9 (https://2020.eshg.org/). The Leena Peltonen Prize is funded by the Leena Peltonen Memorial Fund in the Paulo Foundation. It includes an award of €10 000 (~$12,665). An international nomination committee consists of faculty members of the Wellcome Trust Leena Peltonen School of Human Genomics. The committee is chaired by the Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM). After earning her MSc in Biotechnology, Biophysics, and Biochemistry from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, Gosia Trynka (https://www.sanger.ac.uk/person/trynka-gosia/) obtained a PhD cum laude from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. In 2012, she moved to the US to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute. Dr. Trynka has led the Immune Genomics Group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK since 2014 and, this year, she took on an additional responsibility as the Experimental Science Director at Open Targets (https://www.opentargets.org/), a public/private partnership that uses genomics data to improve drug target identification and prioritization.Login Or Register To Read Full Story