PhD student Fotios Avgidis wins award

At the BLAST XVII conference 2023, AMOLF PhD student Fotios Avgidis has won the Howard C. Berg award for outstanding talk by a young investigator. Howard C. Berg was a pioneer in the field of biophysics.

In his talk Avgidis addressed the origins of phenotypic diversity in cell populations with the same DNA sequence. He showed that phenotypic diversity originates from gene expression noise and that populations of bacteria can leverage this noise to navigate complex and uncertain environments more effectively.

The award came with a cash prize of 500 US dollar.