The Ministry of Education and Science has awarded 228 Scholarships for Outstanding Young Scientists, including 23 in the medical and health sciences. These included Dr Magdalena Kusaczuk from the Department of Pharmaceutical Biochemistry and Dr hab. llona Ościłowska from the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Analysis. The Ministry thus recognised the quality of their research and their scientific achievements to date.
The research activities of Dr hab. Ilona Ościłowska, as a scientific employee of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Analysis, mainly concern cell biochemistry, with particular emphasis on the role of proline metabolism in the regulation of apoptosis and autophagy, and in tissue regeneration processes. In the course of her research, Ilona Ościłowska also analyses the influence of selected natural compounds and selected medicinal products (e.g. metformin, verapamil) on biological processes in normal and cancer cells. She has published the results of these analyses in 38 papers with a total IF = 145, the H-index of her oeuvre is 15. Ilona Ościłowska received the Scientia Nobilita silver medal in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Leader competition for her doctoral thesis, "Effect of proline availability on POX-dependent apoptosis/autophagy in MCF-7 breast cancer cells", carried out under the supervision of Prof. Jerzy Pałka.
Dr Magdalena Kusaczuk is an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Biochemistry, and her scientific activities focus on the search for and investigation of new potential pharmacotherapeutics for the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme of the brain. Her achievements consist of 25 scientific articles, two chapters in monographs and the editing of two scientific monographs with a total IF of 118.2 and 2620 MNiSW points. Dr Kusaczuk was the manager of a grant from the National Science Centre and the winner of the Bekker Scholarship programme of the National Academic Exchange Agency, which included a research internship at the Complutense University of Madrid. In addition, she was the recipient of conference travel grants from scientific societies such as the Polish Biochemical Society, the Czech Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. She has also served as a guest editor for the journals Pharmaceutics and Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. Dr Magdalena Kusaczuk has also received training at overseas research centres such as Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain and Imperial College London in the UK.