FWF-ASTRA Prize for Mahmoud Abdellatif
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In order to retain highly talented researchers in the face of international competition and to attract new talent, the FWF is awarding 18 FWF-ASTRA prizes this year. Each grant, worth around one million euros, supports advanced postdocs on their path to the top of their research field. Among the award winners are eleven women who will carry out their five-year projects at universities and other research institutions throughout Austria.
The FWF is awarding 18 FWF-ASTRA Prizes, each worth around one million euros, to researchers, including eleven women. The awardees impressed the selection panel with their project ideas during a highly competitive selection process and at a hearing before an international jury. The distribution of the funded projects highlights the thematic diversity of basic research: roughly one third each comes from the natural sciences and engineering, biology and medicine, and the humanities and social sciences.
In total, the FWF assessed submissions from 170 researchers in the second round of the FWF-ASTRA Awards. As part of the programme reform, it increased the total funding for these highly competitive career-development grants to 22 million euros, thereby enabling researchers from a broader range of disciplines to benefit – with a balanced representation of women.
Mahmoud Abdellatif, Medical University of Graz – Helping the heart to age healthily
Cardiovascular diseases remain the world’s leading cause of death, with Aging being the greatest risk factor. It is not yet clear why the heart becomes more vulnerable over time, nor whether this process can be slowed down. Important protective mechanisms that decline as humans age and are closely linked to cardiovascular risk are already known. In his ASTRA project, Mahmoud Abdellatif will investigate why these systems fail and how they contribute to the development of diseases in old age. Building on this, new therapeutic strategies will be developed that aim to restore these protective mechanisms and test their ability to maintain heart function in aging. The project challenges a long-standing assumption in medicine: that cardiovascular decline in aging is inevitable.
The Medical University of Graz extends its warmest congratulations on this outstanding achievement!
