Can Aztekin joined the Gurdon Institute at the beginning of 2017 and has recently passed his PhD viva with flying colours. His research discovery with Jerome Jullien and colleagues in the Gurdon and Simons labs of Regeneration-Organizing Cells (ROCs) in the tadpole was published in Science in 2019.

Aztekin now moves on to the School of Life Sciences at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, to become an EPFL Life Sciences Independent Research (ELISIR) scholar.

ELISIR scholars have an independent research budget, access to state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure, and a mentorship programme. ELISIR scholars are not tenured and appointed for an initial period of 3 years, which can be renewed for another 2 years. The scholars do not have mandatory teaching duties and have the opportunity to seek additional external funding.

In addition to the discovery of ROCs (in green and blue in the image above), Aztekin subsequently published a paper describing the role of inflammation in the regeneration-permissive environment in regeneration-competent tadpoles.