EPFL BioE Postdoc Chan Cao Awarded Major SNSF PRIMA Grant

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) PRIMA grants “are aimed at excellent women researchers who show a high potential for obtaining a professorship.” Awarded scientists are funded for an independent research project with their own group at least at the group leader level within a Swiss research institution. The PRIMA grant covers the grantee's salary and project costs for five years.

Dr. Chan Cao has received one of the 18 Prima grants that the SNSF has awarded in 2020. Dr. Cao is a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL’s Laboratory of Biomolecular Modeling (LBM), headed by Professor Matteo Dal Peraro in the Institute of Bioengineering. Her research focuses on developing single-molecule approaches to address questions in life science and diagnosis. A main part of her work is on nanopore technology, an electrophoretic approach that allows the characterization of molecules of interest in real-time with sub-angstrom resolution and without the need for additional labels or amplification in aqueous solution. Nanopore technology has been successfully applied in sequencing long fragments of DNA, and has shown great potential for single-molecule proteomics applications.

“Being awarded a prestigious grant like PRIMA is a great honor, a recognition of my previous research work, and valuable support for my future academic career,” says Cao. “It gives me the opportunity to build my own research group in Switzerland with which I will push the limits of nanopore sensing, and maximize its potential for as many fields of application as possible.”