Travel Grant for Early-Career Scientist to Train at the JRC Summer School on Non-Animal Approaches in Science

We are pleased to announce the winner of our early-career scientist award to attend the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) Summer School on Non-Animal Approaches in Science. Taking place at the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 19-23 May 2025, the summer school provides attendees an opportunity to explore new developments in the field of non-animal approaches through expert lectures and interactive sessions. Each attendee will also present a poster on their work.

Kirsten Veltman is a PhD candidate at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). Her research focuses on non-animal safety assessments of non-genotoxic carcinogens, combining experimental and computational approaches to understand human-relevant mechanistic insights and advance chemical safety.

Past Winners

2023:

Karolina Kopańska is a PhD candidate in the PharmacoInformatics group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Her research focuses on developing in silico models and probabilistic methods that can produce and combine toxicological evidence and estimate uncertainty for risk assessment.

Oluwole Akinosho is a master’s student at the University of Potsdam in Germany and is working on his thesis at a non-animal organ-on-a-chip laboratory, TissUse GmbH. His research has focused on optimising the renal model in a multi-organ chip, HUMIMIC Chip 4, which aims to replace the use of animals for drug toxicology assessments.

2019:

Patrícia Zoio, a PhD student from the NOVA University of Lisbon, is developing a fully humanised skin-on-a-chip model that can be used in long-term medical applications, without using any animal components.