Gunnar Öquist, Olivier Keech, Judith Felten, Carl Kempe at the prize ceremony (from left, picture Johan Gunséus)[15-12-03] For the fourth time Carl Kempe, the chair of the Kempe Foundations, presented the Gunnar Öquist Fellows during a ceremony at the Chemical Biological Centre KBC. This year, two researchers at UPSC received each a SEK 3 million research grant and a SEK 50,000 personal funding. Judith Felten, researcher at the UPSC-department for Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology (SLU), and Olivier Keech, associate professor at the UPSC-department of Plant Physiology (UmU), are the two awardees.
During the ceremony Gunnar Öquist reminded the audience on the Aarhus declaration 2012 and its five principles on how excellence in research is sustained and nutured: Recognising and nuturing talents, trust and freedom for outstanding researchers, long-term perspectives for pursuing truly novel research, creative and dynamic research envionments, and providing research funding that stimulates the exchange of knowledge between different research areas. The Kempe Foundation's fellowship will give the two young plant scientists the freedom to conduct new research projects in a highly interdisciplinary research environment at the UPSC and KBC. The emeritus professor and former permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will act as a mentor for the two young scientists.
Olivier Keech's research interests are focused on plant metabolism, in detail the regulation of senecence. He came for the first time as a French exchange student to Umeå and the University of Agricultural Sciences. After his PhD in Forest Ecophysiology at the University of Nancy and a postdoc at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia, he returned to Umeå as a postdoc. He then became 2014 assistant professor and lecturer at Umeå University.
Judith Felten will use the fellowship to study interaction of mycorrhizal fungi and cell-wall formation in tree roots. She studied biochemistry and molecular biology in Bochum, Germany, Strasbourg and Lyon, France, and received her PhD from the Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy, France and Freiburg University, Germany, for studies on tree-microbe interactions. In 2010 she was recruited to UPSC as a postdoc. She has now a researcher position at SLU and the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at UPSC.