FEBS Excellence Award
Miriam Stoeber, assistant professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism in the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, is the winner of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) Excellence Award. This prize supports particularly talented young research group leaders. Miriam Stoeber has been rewarded for her promising research aimed at deciphering the mechanisms of transmembrane signalling. Her group is indeed developing small antibody fragments, known as nanobodies, which target and modulate physiologically important G protein-coupled receptors. Nanobodies are innovative research tools and represent the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. The FEBS Excellence Grant will fund part of her research expenses for three years.
Miriam Stoeber is a specialist in the functional analysis of membrane proteins. She has worked at ETH Zurich and Oxford University, where she studied the assembly and structure of membrane protein complexes using molecular and structural biology, and at the University of California, San Francisco, where she researched intracellular trafficking, this time in the context of intracellular signalling by G protein-coupled receptors. There, she initiated her research on opioid receptor signalling pathways, which transmit the effects of painkillers such as morphine and fentanyl, as well as neuropeptides. Awardee of an SNSF professorial fellowship, she has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine in 2019. Her research focuses on the function of opioid receptors at the cellular level, using new methods to visualise signalling pathways in living cells with high resolution.