To start her own lab, Kinga received two Polish grants: Polish Returns from NAWA and Sonata Bis from NCN agencies, totalling £1.1 million. The research in the Kamieniarz-Gdula lab will build on the finding made during her time at the Dunn School that premature termination attenuates transcription in vertebrates. On her new position and research plans, Kinga commented:
“Obtaining a faculty position at my home university has always been my dream, so when I got the offer I didn’t hesitate for a second. IBMiB provides an excellent environment for molecular biology research, and the RNA community here is particularly strong. I am convinced it is the best place in Poland to implement my research plans. The long-term vision of my laboratory will be to better understand the gene regulatory aspect of transcription termination and how it is linked to other levels of gene expression such as chromatin and RNA processing.”
Kinga trained as an experimental and computational biologist during her undergraduate studies in Poland. For her PhD, she joined the group of Robert Schneider at the Max-Planck-Institute in Freiburg, Germany, where she studied chromatin biology. In 2012 Kinga moved to Oxford to Nick’s lab to work on the mechanisms of transcription and RNA processing, supported by a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship. When asked about her research at the Dunn School, Kinga said:
“When I joined Nick’s lab, all the published work from the group was based on studies of single genes, and there was a need to move to genome-wide approaches. My bioinformatics background allowed me to extend experimental data in the lab with analysis of published genomic datasets, and later also NGS data generated in the lab, leading to fruitful collaborations. My independent research focused on how human gene expression is regulated by a factor that couples RNA 3′ processing with transcription termination. I much enjoyed my time at the Dunn School – the scientific spirit of curiosity, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, also the excellent infrastructure.”
If you would like to keep up to date with Kinga’s news, you can follow her on Twitter (@STOPlabPl) or visit her lab’s home page https://STOPlab.org
To read about Kinga’s work, see these papers:
https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/pdfExtended/S1097-2765(19)30047-4
Written by Isabella Maudlin