Congratulations to Ardashel Latsuzbaia, PhD at our epidemiology and microbial genomics unit! He won the Camille Gira prize for best PhD student presentation at the National Microbiology Day 2018, organized by the Luxembourg Society for Microbiology (LSfM) and which took recently place at the LIST in Belvaux.

8 PhD students had initially submitted an abstract/summary of their work and the selection committee of board members of the LSfM selected the best 4 of them to give presentations during the National Microbiology Day. The audience at the conference then voted for the best presentation (board members had no voting rights!). Ardashel’s presentation “Gammapapillomavirus in cervical samples by untargeted next generation sequencing” won with the highest number of votes.

The presentation was about the surprising discovery of Ardashal and Joël Mossong PhD that some types of human papillomavirus, which are normally only found on skin, called gammapapillomavirus, can also be detected in cervical swab samples. The team also discovered two new papillomavirus genotypes, which had never been described before!

The Biogasvereenegung asbl of which Camille Gira was the president sponsored the prize. The LSfM committee spontaneously decided two days after Gira’s passing away to award the prize in his name.

Prizes like these are important milestones in a scientist’s career and they display that the local scientific community has recognized research in microbiology conducted here at the LNS as excellent.