In the second round of 2015 Calin Plesa, who recently obtained his PhD degree at Delft/BN Cees Dekker lab, was one of the sixteen people to receive a NWO-Rubicon grant. Calin will use his grant to study the construction of new signal transduction cascades in human cells at the Department of Bioengineering of the University of California Los Angeles (USA). Calin aims to develop new methods to synthesise DNA and then use this to construct new signal pathways in cells.

In this first round of 2015, two other young doctors from the group of Cees Dekker, Rifka Vlijm (now at Heidelberg, Germany) and Felix Hol (now at Stanford, USA) were awarded a Rubicon grant. For many scientists, experience abroad is an important step in their career.

Rubicon grants
Each year, NWO can provide about 60 young researchers with funding from the Rubicon programme (in total seven million euros). NWO chose the name Rubicon in 2005 for its programme promoting individual research to keep talented researchers with PhDs in the scientific community. The Rubicon is the river that Julius Caesar crossed in 49 BC before embarking on a series of victories that led him to famously proclaim ‘veni, vidi, vici’.