IESF-OM CODIGE Prize 2024 for Best Master Thesis bagged by Richmond Crisostomo
Organized by the Societes des Ingenieurs et Scientifiques de France Occitanie-Mediterranee (IESF-OM) and the Collegium D'Ingénierie des Grandes Écoles du Languedoc-Roussillon (CODIGE), this prestigious award recognizes the best scientific dissertations in both fundamental scientific and applied engineering research.
The awarding ceremony was held last June 20, 2024 - at the Institut Agro Montpellier. Together with Ms. Manon Longvixay from Institut Agro (Thesis Prize: Applied/Engineering Research Category), their respective works were recognized and they both had the opportunity to speak to the community about their experiences throughout their own journeys.
More info: https://www.institut-agro-montpellier.fr/actualites/ingenieure-agro-laureate-prix-iesf-codige-2024
Richmond discussed about his stay at The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste Italy in 2023:
Under the initiative Project Strain Dynamics, his 6-month thesis project was supervised by Jacopo Grilli from the Quantitative Life Sciences (QLS) section of the ICTP. To characterize population trajectories at the edge of ecological
differentiation, he developed mathematical methods and numerical implementations for strain identification and abundance estimation utilizing statistical inference and simulations. Building on established approaches to identifying microbial strains (distinct ecological structures below the species level) using high-resolution longitudinal metagenomics data, he utilized allele frequency trajectories as compositional units that constitute individual strains. In particular, he devised a maximum likelihood estimation or MLE-based numerical approach for retrieving the underlying signals as unbiased estimates and compared them with numerical simulations. Further, he proposed a novel method using the MLE-framework to obtain a more accurate measurement of the phylogenetic distance between strains accounting for their individual abundances and the ensemble of constitutive alleles.
This ongoing work has provided both meaningful biological insights as well as robust and scalable bioinformatic tools that will be useful for future research. There is still much work to be done on this front and Richmond intends to continue with the collaborations he has forged and progress forward with the efforts to this cause in his spare time.
Beyond his work on bacterial communities, he was also able to take the opportunity to talk about the communities of people that have been integral to his journey. His speech became a platform for his advocacies about science and
society: emphasizing the crucial role of building and sustaining communities and spaces where aspiring young scientists can thrive, especially for those coming from the developing world.
Migrating from the gut to the brain, Richmond is currently based in Freiburg (Germany), attempting to provide a mechanistic understanding of the self-organized assembly of neuronal networks. He started working on his doctorate in October 2023, under the supervision of Dr. Samora Okujeni and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Egert at the Laboratory for Biomicrotechnology-IMTEK University of Freiburg and the Bernstein Center Freiburg.
More info: https://www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de/about/people/crisostomo
On most days you can find Richmond at the lab tinkering with virtual petri dishes, “growing” neuronal networks in silico - or walking around the lake at the Freiburg See Park, basking in the sun.