Jul 09, 2022
DR. MELISSA ADASME AWARDED COMMERZBANK PRIZE
Heike Heuberger, Prof. Michael Schroeder, Dr. Melissa Adasme und Prof. Ursula M. Staudinger (v.l.nr.) nach der Übergabe des Dr. Walter Seipp-Preis.
On July 8, 2022, promising young scientists of the TU Dresden were awarded the dissertation prizes of the Commerzbank Cultural Foundation Dresden and the Dr. Walter Seipp Prize of the Commerzbank Foundation. For 25 years, the Commerzbank Foundation and the Dresden Cultural Foundation of Commerzbank have been honoring extraordinary dissertations of young scientists in this way, thus specifically promoting young academics.
The Dr. Walter Seipp Prize, endowed with 4,000 euros, was awarded to the bioinformatician Dr. Melissa Adasme. Her dissertation, "Structure-based drug repositioning by exploiting structural properties of drug's binding mode," was completed at the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) of TU Dresden. Her work addresses a particularly topical issue in light of the Covid 19 pandemic: finding new uses for already known drugs. With her structure-based approach, she fills a gap in pharmaceutical research, where no systematic approach to this problem has been established so far, so that potential agents, e.g. for the treatment of Covid-19, can potentially be identified more quickly.
For Melissa Adasme, the award ceremony was very special: "I am so happy to participate in this beautiful ceremony and to receive such great recognition for my PhD thesis. My special thanks go to Prof. Michael Schroeder for including me in his great team, for guiding me and teaching me to do quality science, and for being such a great supervisor."
Prof. Schroeder believes the Commerzbank Award is highly deserved for her achievement:
"Melissa Adasme has done a wonderful job examining patterns in the interplay between drugs and their targets. She uses these to discover new uses for drugs. The dissertation is very well published with 10 journal articles."
Melissa Adasme came to TU Dresden through the DAAD Study program after completing her graduate studies in bioinformatics at Talca University, Chile and graduated summa cum laude with a PhD here in 2021. Until 2021 she worked as a researcher in the Bioinformatics group at BIOTEC. Since January, she has been working as a data mining scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.
The Faculty of Computer Science congratulates her!