Long-term funding to SciLifeLab researchers: “a huge boost and game-changer to starting a lab”
27 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows have been appointed, among them SciLifeLab researchers Maliheh Mehrshad and Camilla Engblom, who now receive five-year basic research grants.
The grants, from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, are aimed at researchers in the beginning of their careers, to allow them to tackle long-term and difficult research questions.
“It is an absolute pleasure and a genuine honour to be selected as a Wallenberg Academy Fellow and to join this program. This program gives researchers the chance to pursue high-risk, high-gain research ideas, and I’m incredibly grateful for that support,” says Maliheh Mehrshad, SciLifeLab and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences researcher.
“[This] feels fantastic! It is an incredible honor and a privilege to receive this grant and become part of the WAF community,” says Camilla Engblom, SciLifeLab Fellow and Karolinska Institutet researcher.
Q&A: Camilla Engblom
What will this mean for you and your research, getting long-term funding like this?
It means a lot ! It means we can focus on asking ambitious questions that may take longer to answer and it allows me to invest in people and instruments to build a research program that can last for a long time. Similar to the SciLifeLab fellow, DDLS, and other starting grant programs, it is a huge boost and game-changer to starting a lab.
Any ambitious new projects you plan to take on?
Absolutely! The goal of my WAF-funded project is to capture disease-associated antibody-producing cells directly and use their location to figure out fundamental regulatory elements of B cell and plasma cell biology.
Ultimately, we want to identify pathological or protective B cell receptor sequences (i.e., antibodies) for therapeutic purposes in cancer and inflammatory bowel disease.
Q&A: Maliheh Mehrshad
How does it feel to be selected as a Wallenberg Academy Fellow?
The multi-step application process itself was transformative; pushing me to think more deeply about my idea, its potential, and the path ahead. With every step, I found myself becoming more fascinated by plasmid-dependent phages. These are long-evolving, complex biological interactions that we still understand only superficially. Having the chance, and now the support, to explore their co-evolutionary strategies and ecological dynamics is incredibly exciting.
I believe nature often holds elegant solutions to the problems we face, including the growing challenge of antibiotic resistance. By uncovering the dynamics between plasmid-dependent phages, plasmids, and their shared hosts, we might discover strategies that can inspire new interventions.
Emotionally, it feels a bit like being handed a rare ticket to an exclusive premiere, directed by evolution, edited by ecology, and starring my favorite actors: bacteria, phages, and plasmids. And it is a true privilege to be one of the people who gets to uncover and share parts of that story.
What will this mean for you and your research, getting long-term funding like this?
This long-term support is incredibly meaningful to me and my research. My research focuses on understanding complex, multi-player interactions among microbes, especially disentangling parasitic interactions. The majority of research in this field focuses on two-player interactions, but once you add a third player, the whole system can change. New behaviors, unexpected co-evolutionary dynamics, and surprising ecological outcomes can emerge. My goal is to study multi-player interactions and provide an intuitive model for them that brings our understanding of microbial interactions closer to the true complexity we see in nature.
This long-term support gives me and my team the time, space, and continuity to follow where the science leads, without having to frequently pause and search for the next short-term grant. In a way, getting the chance to work hard on something you truly believe in is a privilege, and this funding allows us to fully commit to uncovering some of nature’s best-kept secrets.
Learn more about the Wallenberg Academy Fellows program
Portraits of Maliheh Mehrshad and Camilla Engblom: Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse / Patrik Lundin, montage by SciLifeLab.
