Meet the First WALII Travel Grant Awardees!

Olivia Maria Silva Carmo (Boeynaems Lab - Baylor College of Medicine)

The first-ever WALII Travel Grants have been awarded to Olivia Maria Silva Carmo (Baylor College of Medicine) and Sheila Ferer (California State University Channel Islands). WALII Travel Grants were created to allow researchers to travel to other WALII labs to gain new skills and expertise unavailable at their home institutions while pursuing integrative, collaborative research that further explores the relationship between water and life. 

Carmo is a Postdoc in the Boeynaems lab at Baylor College of Medicine. Her project “Studying a local species to prepare for a global crisis: unfurling mechanisms of desiccation tolerance from the resurrection fern Pleopeltis polypodioides” is a collaboration between the Boeynaems lab and the Otegui Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Olivia is interested in biomolecular condensates and their contributions to adaptive responses in living cells. During her Ph.D., she studied protein trafficking in malaria-infected red blood cells under the supervision of Prof. Leann Tilley and Dr. Matthew Dixon at the University of Melbourne. Through the WALII Travel Grant, Olivia will travel from Texas to Wisconsin to use electron tomography to characterize plant cell ultrastructure and correlate the findings with datasets collected at the Baylor College of Medicine. Additionally, Olivia will use the opportunity to test other sample preparations and imaging approaches unavailable at her home institution. 
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Sheila Ferer (Tapia Lab - California State University Chanel Islands)

Ferer is a research assistant in the Tapia Lab at California State University Channel Islands. Her project, "Global proteome rewiring in times of desiccation and rehydration" is a collaboration between the Tapia Lab and Boeynaems Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine. Sheila’s primary research interests revolve around yeast genetics, gene regulation and stress biology. Through the WALII Travel Grant, Sheila will travel from California to Texas to screen their yeast GFP-fusion collection using the high-content platforms available to the Boeynaems lab with the goal of creating a detailed picture of protein localization during drying and rehydration.
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The Travel Grant program provides funding for up to 2 weeks of travel for WALII personnel to visit a WALII lab on a different campus to gain skills and experience unavailable at their home institution. Training and Education at WALII happens at all career stages, from undergraduates to faculty, with exposure to new tools, approaches, and biological systems. Learn about joining a WALII lab here. ​