Fulbright Scholarship for Kim de Luca

As part of its larger program to promote intercultural competence, the Fulbright Commission The Netherlands has selected six Dutch PhD candidates for the 2021-2022 cohort of grantees. Kim de Luca received a Fulbright Scholarship for a research stay at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently finalizing her PhD in the group of Jop Kind, De Luca will collaborate with the laboratory of Aaron Streets, Department of Bioengineering. There, she will employ a new technology to study DNA repair in individual cells with high resolution.

“My PhD work addresses how the organization of cell nuclei is related to processes such as gene regulation and DNA repair. At the moment, we analyze pictures and genetic data of DNA repair separately. But the two methods contain information that are potentially more useful when we consider them together. The laboratory I am moving to was directly inspired by our earlier work and independently developed a technique that is well suited to that task. With the help of this fellowship, I have the opportunity to further study certain questions that arose during my PhD. I am very excited about this scientific collaboration and to experience the San Francisco Bay Area!”