Seventeen thousand people from around the world applied. Only 1.610 secured funding. Paula Núñez Pizarro, who holds a doctorate from the Catholic University of Chile, was one of them.
Her award is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship, one of the European Union’s most demanding programs, and it will take her to the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in the Netherlands. There, she will dedicate herself to something that sounds almost poetic: listening to what Chilean fungi have to say at the molecular level.
She is searching for compounds with antibacterial activity hidden in species that exist only in Chile, with the goal of identifying the genes responsible for these properties. If she succeeds, the world could have new antibiotics just when they are needed most.
