BioCity Turku Awarded the Elias Tillandz Prize to the Best Publications of the Year
The Elias Tillandz prize 2013 was awarded to the two best scientific publications of 2013 by the researchers at BioCity Turku.
he leaders of the research groups, Professor Lea Sistonen and Riitta Lahesmaa, received the Tillandz prize at the BioCity symposium on 21 August 2014. Vice Rector Kalle-Antti Suominen of the University of Turku, who opened the symposium, awarded the prize.
The 24th BioCity symposium started on Thursday 21 August 2014 with the Eliaz Tillandz prize ceremony. The prize was awarded to the two best scientific publications of 2013 and the winners were an article of the research group lead by Professor Riitta Lahesmaa and an article of the research group lead by Professor Lea Sistonen.
The articles were chosen by the Scientific Advisory Board of BioCity Turku that is comprised of international top researchers and chaired by Professor Matthias Hentze of the University of Heidelberg. This year, the articles concerned the regulation of white blood cells and heat shock factors in genomewide transcriptional response to acute stress.
The research article of Lahesmaa’s group titled Global Chromatin State Analysis Reveals Lineage-Specific Enhancers during the Initiation of Human T helper 1 and T helper 2 Cell Polarization was published in the renowned Immunity journal. The researchers in Lahesmaa’s group are R. David Hawkins, Antti Larjo, Subhash K. Tripathi, Ulrich Wagner, Ying Luu, Tapio Lönnberg, Sunil K. Raghav, Leonard K. Lee, Riikka Lund, Bing Ren and Harri Lähdesmäki.
The research of Sistonen’s group was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America journal, titled Transcriptional response to stress in the dynamic chromatin environment of cycling and mitotic cells. The research group includes Anniina Vihervaara, Christian Sergelius, Jenni Vasara, Malin A. H. Blom, Alexandra N. Elsing and Pia Roos-Mattjus.
The Tillandz prize is named after Professor Elias Tillandz (1640–1693) of the Royal Academy of Turku, who brought empirical research to Turku and published the first scientific research of the region. The prize includes a grant and it is supported by Åbo Akademi University Endowment.
Text and photo: Hannu Aaltonen
Translation: Mari Ratia