ISBUC Awards

To celebrate all of the inspiring and boundary-pushing structural biology research conducted by junior researchers at the University of Copenhagen, there are several awards regularly distributed. This includes the recently established Best Paper Award, Best Flash Talk Award and Best Poster Award. These awards are handed out at the yearly ISBUC Annual Meeting. A complied list of all the past award recipients can be viewed below. 

Best Paper Awards

 

The first-ever Best Paper Award was presented to Haidai Hu for the paper titled Structure and mechanism of the Zorya anti-phage defence system

Zorya is a recently identified and widely distributed bacterial immune system that protects bacteria from viral (phage) infections and the paper defines some foundational mechanisms of Zorya function. The authors uncovered how Zorya detects and neutralizes phages step by step, as the paper flows from system identification to structural elucidation to mechanistic interpretation. To come across key aspects of the Zorya defence mechanism, the authors took a truly integrative approach and combined single- particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), mutagenesis, functional assays, proteomics and total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. Haidai Hu was the main driver in this paper, especially in the structural biology results. He also wrote, submitted, and disseminated the work.

 

Best Flash Talk Awards

In 2025, the Best Flash Talk was awarded to Julien Streit for the talk The ribosome lowers the entropic penalty of protein folding.

 

The 2024 Best Flash Talk award was presented to Mira Doombi for the talk Towards elucidating the structure of mitochondrial DNA helicase TWINKLE by cryo-EM.

 

 

The Best Flash Talk at the 2023 ISBUC Annual Meeting was awarded to Ciara Pugh for the talk MAASTY: A (dis)ordered copolymer for structural determination of human membrane proteins in native nanodiscs. 

 

 

The Best Flash Talk for 2022 was presented to Andreas Haahr Larsen for the talk Conformational changes of the AMPA receptor and its affect on desensitisation.

 

 

Jacob Kæstel-Hansen was awarded the Best Flash Talk Award in 2021 for the talk Machine learning-assisted analysis of biomolecular interactions captured by single particle tracking.

 

 

Best Poster Awards

 

The Best Poster Awards at the 2025 ISBUC Annual Meeting were presented to: 

  • Louise Helbig Nexø: Unlocking The Molecular Mechanism Of Glutamine Transport By Human SLC38A2.
  • Christian Kofoed: Transforming cell-surface signatures into customizable protein functions.

 

 

The Best Poster Awards were presented to: 

  • Anna Ida Trolle: A coarse-grained model for simulations of salt-dependent structural transitions and phase separation of disordered proteins​
  • Fabian Hink: Inhibition of rna-protein interactions and phase separation of hnrnpa1 using de novo cyclic peptides
  • Nadja Joachim: Phosphorous recovery using optimised phosphate binding proteins
  • Thea Schinkel: Cryo-EM aided design of multivalent aptamer nanostructures (cad-man) for enhanced biomolecular targeting​

 

 

The Best Poster Awards at the European Rosetta Conference were presented to:

  • Christopher Frank (Dietz lab, TUM, Germany): Machine learning methods for the design of large proteins
  • Dina Listov (Fleishmann Lab, Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Israel): A fully computational design of high-efficiency Kemp eliminase
  • Holly Ford (Anderson lab, Bristol, UK): Computational design and biochemical characterisation of a molecular wire
  • Victor Klein-Sousa (Taylor lab, Copenhagen, Danemark): Towards a complete phage tail fiber structure atlas

 

 

The Best Poster Awards at the ISBUC Annual Meeting were presented to: 

  • Jesper Elmsted Dreier: Mechanism of small molecule mediated inhibition of lipid-induced α-synuclein aggregation

  • Kristine Walløe Salomon Exploring the Mechanistic Binding Differences of Atypical Dopamine Transporter Inhibitors and Cocaine 

 

 

The Best Poster Award was presented to Rooshanie Nadia Ejaz for the poster titled Structural and functional characterization of a novel contractile injection system in Salmonella enterica. 

 

 

The Best Poster Award was presented to Solveig Gaarde Schmidt at the 2022 ISBUC Annual Meeting for the poster The dopamine transporter antiports K+ to increase the uptake of dopamine.

 

 

Frederik Emil Thomasen received the Best Poster Award for the poster titled Interplay of folded domains and the disordered low-complexity domain in mediating hnRNPA1 phase separation.