Rise up! Award 2024 presented to two Bonn researchers Rise up! Award 2024 presented to two Bonn researchers

Prof. Eva-Christina Schulte heads the section "Psychiatric Genomics and Multiomics" at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB). She is also a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) "Life and Health" at the University of Bonn. In cooperation with the Institute of Human Genetics at the UKB, Prof. Schulte uses different levels of biology ("omics") to understand the biological basis of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and thus to develop new therapeutic options. In their Rise up! In this project, Prof. Schulte and her team will investigate the genetic regulation of components of lipids along the brain-cerebrospinal fluid-blood axis.
 
Her colleague Prof. Özgün Gökce heads the working group "Systems Neuroscience – Cell Diversity" at the Clinic for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Gerontopsychiatry at the UKB. The neurobiologist, who is also a member of the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation2 at the University of Bonn, is looking for the key to the mechanisms of brain aging. To this end, he plans to use new spatial transcriptomics technologies to investigate the basic principles of the nervous system in both healthy and pathological states. His project focuses on exploring how lipids alter and modulate the adaptive and innate immune responses associated with aging and neurodegeneration.
The Rise up! programme is aimed at outstanding and unusually creative basic researchers from biology, chemistry and medicine who have accepted a W2 professorship at a German university for the first time. The award is endowed with up to 600,000 euros each.