The Veolia Doctorandus Prize for Natural Sciences is awarded for the innovative approach, the most outstanding achievement and the professional and research activity of a doctoral student, particularly in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. Martin Toul, from the Loschmidt Laboratories at Masaryk University, studies how enzymes work at the molecular level and what their greatest limitations are. He is also interested in how this knowledge can be put to practical use in industry or medicine. The young, talented scientist gave an interview to M Magazine.
What do these awards mean to you?
I appreciate the awards I have received, but they really belong to the whole research group. Without the other members, it would have been impossible to achieve any results. I am very grateful to them for their work. In any case, it is an excellent recognition in the scientific community and a confirmation that the research my colleagues and I have been doing is really relevant and has an important impact on society. The awards motivate me to continue my scientific work at the interface of biomedicine, biochemistry and biophysics.
Do the awards help you meet important people and raise the profile of your research?
Winning an award certainly brings a degree of visibility within the scientific community. I haven't made direct use of my new connections yet, but the awards have allowed me to meet some great new people from the academic and commercial scientific communities. I believe these will be useful contacts for possible future collaborations and taking scientific projects to an even higher level thanks to the extensive multidisciplinary.
What are you currently working on, and what would you like to achieve in the next year?
I finished my PhD a few months ago and moved to a new position abroad, specifically at the VIB Research Institute in Ghent, Belgium. Here I am still involved in protein research, but in a completely different context and using different methods to broaden my horizons beyond the projects I worked on during my PhD. I firmly believe that this will allow me to combine different approaches into the most efficient solution. In particular, I am looking at a protein that was shown only last year to stimulate the regeneration of heart tissue after a heart attack. We want to describe the exact mechanism of this regeneration at the molecular level. Ideally, this understanding will allow us to modify the protein to make heart tissue regeneration as efficient as possible for beneficial use in clinical practice. This would give patients who have suffered a heart attack the best chance of a successful recovery and a return to everyday life.
RNDr. Martin Toul, Ph.D., is the holder of two MU Rector’s Awards for outstanding students of both Master’s and doctoral degree programmes and the winner of the Brno PhD Talent Award (2018/2019). In 2020, he was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship for PhD students, thanks to which he spent a semester at the University of Texas at Austin in the group of Prof. Kenneth A. Johnson. He completed the MUNI Mendel Doctorandus programme and defended his dissertation in the European Doctorate mode. This year, he was awarded the MIT Prize for his work. In his free time, Martin Toul enjoys snowboarding and ballroom dancing.