Cynthia Sharma awarded the DGHM Main Prize 2023
09/26/2023Congratulations! At this year's annual conference of the DGHM in Lübeck, Cynthia Sharma was awarded the DGHM Main Prize. The main prize is awarded to scientists with outstanding and usually long-standing research activity in a current and promising field of hygiene and microbiology.
The German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology (DGHM) awards several prizes and honours at the annual conference. These include the main and sponsorship prizes, bioMérieux Diagnostic Prize, BD Research Prize, PhD prizes, DGHM Lecturer and the Ferdinand Cohn Medal.
Cynthia Sharma was a board member of the DGHM specialist group "Gastrointestinal Infections" from 2015-2021. Next year, she is co-hosting as a conference president of the VAAM (German Association for General and Applied Microbiology) the 7th joint DGHM/VAAM conference in Würzburg together with the conference president of the DGHM Oliver Kurzai.
Her research focuses on understanding mechanisms of gene regulation of bacterial pathogens. Her laboratory has been developing diverse high-throughput sequencing approaches for transcriptome and translatome analyses as well as for the investigation of post-transcriptional regulation. In addition, her group is developing new infection models based on tissue engineering to investigate the role of small RNAs and small proteins in infections and to identify new virulence factors.
Cynthia Sharma’s (Chair of Molecular Infection Biology II) work has already be recognized by several prestigious research awards, including the Robert Koch Postdoctoral Award in 2011, the DGHM Young Investigator Prize in 2013, the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2015, as Winner in the Life Sciences Category at the Falling Walls Science Breakthroughs in 2021, and the Pettenkofer Prize in 2022. In 2022 she also received an ERC Consolidator grant.
