Pia Sommerkamp, who carried out her PhD at HI-STEM and the Division of Stem Cells and Cancer at the DKFZ until July 2019, has been awarded the Wilma-Moser Prize of Heidelberg University. The award annually honors the youngest female doctoral candidate finishing the PhD with distinction (“summa cum laude”) within the faculties of Medicine and Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences. Pia defended her PhD in July 2019 and is currently continuing her work as a Postdoc at HI-STEM. 

As part of her PhD, which was jointly supervised by Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid and Andreas Trumpp, Pia Sommerkamp could show that alternative polyadenylation (APA) is a novel molecular control mechanism used by hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) to adapt their metabolic and proliferative activity to emergency situations. Her PhD work was published in Cell Stem Cell (2020) and in Scientific Reports (2019).