Max-Kade Foundation Partners with VU-LU Collaboration
The Vanderbilt-Leipzig Collaboration is pleased to announce its partnership with the Max Kade Foundation to support the exchange of students and faculty between the universities. The Max Kade Foundation takes pride in participating and sponsoring various programs which encourage the exchange of academic ideas among universities and colleges in the United States and in German-speaking countries (www.maxkadefoundation.org). The foundation recently awarded the Vanderbilt-Leipzig research exchange program a grant to cover the travel and support of six undergraduate student exchanges, as well as two faculty exchanges per year. The students will travel to their respective university and join a research project under a senior supervisor. They will be engaged for ten weeks in the challenging and exciting scientific communities of each institution, while likewise being immersed in rich cultural experiences. During their exchange, the two faculty members will teach short courses which will introduce new technologies and research endeavors not available at the other university.
The first set of exchanges will take place in the summer and fall of 2014. The students from each university were selected from a competitive pool of applicants through a process of both written and oral interviews. Three Vanderbilt undergraduate students will travel together to Leipzig University during the early summer months. Aditya Karhade will join Dr. Annette Beck-Sickinger’s lab to investigate the binding site of chemokine receptor-like 1. At the same time, Elizabeth Ann King will research the “Expression, Purification, and Refolding of the GHS-1‐R Receptor for Ligand Structure Determination” in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Huster. Lastly, Zhewen Zhang will partner with Dr. Martin Bergen on the project “Determining the “Phospho-Barcode” of the D1 dopamine receptor.” Dr. Jens Meiler of Vanderbilt will teach a short-course at Leipzig in December titled “Modeling GPCRs with Rosetta.”
Later in the summer, three Leipzig students will travel to Vanderbilt to join their selected research projects. Luise Spormann will join Dr. Larry Marnett’s lab to work on the “Screening of orphan GPCRs for activation by prostaglandin glycerols.” Ulrike Kinkel will research the “Construction of arrestin mutants with enhanced specificity for individual NPY receptors” in Dr. Vsevolod Gurevich’s lab. Finally, Caroline Schindler joins Dr. Heidi Hamm to research the “Mechanism of NPY2 mediated GI activation.” Dr. Annette Beck-Sickinger will travel from Leipzig to Vanderbilt to teach the short course “GPCR Signaling.”
We look forward to seeing the results of these new collaborative efforts. The Vanderbilt-Leipzig Collaboration expresses its sincerest appreciation to the Max-Kade Foundation for supporting the growth of our International Research Program.
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