Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Developmental Biology (JDB), it is my great pleasure to announce that the winner of the 2019 JDB Travel Award is Ms. Joana Esteves de Lima, who is a Post-doctoral in Prof. Frédéric Relaix’s laboratory in the Faculté de Médecine at Université Paris Est, France. On behalf of JDB, Ms. de Lima will be supported with 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend the Society for Developmental Biology’s 78th Annual Meeting.

Ms. de Lima is working on analyzing the role of the Pax3 and Pax7 genes during myogenesis. She is developing an ambitious research project exploring the molecular interaction between these key transcription factors and chromatin­modifying enzymes to elicit transcriptional activation of downstream gene regulatory networks.

Prof. Simon J. Conway
Editor-in-Chief

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Journal of Developmental Biology (ISSN 2221-3759; https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jdb) is an open access journal published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland. JDB maintains a rigorous peer-review and a rapid publication process. The overall median time from submission to final publication was 35 days in 2018.

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Developmental Biology (JDB), it is my great pleasure to announce that the winner of the 2018 JDB Travel Award is Ms. Victoria Deneke, BS who is a fifth-year graduate student in Dr. Stefano Di Talia’s laboratory in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University Medical Center, USA. On behalf of JDB,
Ms. Deneke will be supported with 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend the 2018 EMBO/EMBL Symposium on “Tissue Self-Organization: Challenging the Systems”.

Victoria is using Drosophila as her model organism system and addressing the mechanisms of synchronization of mitosis in the earlier phases of embryonic development, thereby ensuring coordinated normal development. She has taken an interdisciplinary approach combining molecular cell biology and embryology with quantitative live imaging and mathematical modelling, and was able to demonstrate in an elegant Developmental Cell paper that waves of Cdk1 activity synchronize the cell cycle in early Drosophila embryos. These studies provide a new mechanism by which global synchronization can arise from a spreading of local synchrony. She has received several honours and awards including a HHMI International Student Research Fellowship, a Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Fellowship and was a Notre Dame Hesburgh International Scholar.