December 2014


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Dr. Sephra Rampersad, Lecturer in Biochemistry at the Department of Life Sciences at the St. Augustine Campus of The UWI created history by being the first person from the English-Speaking Caribbean to be awarded an Academy of Sciences of the Developing World (TWAS) Young Scientist Prize for Latin America and the Caribbean. These annual prestigious prizes introduced since 2005 are given to scientists from Latin America and the Caribbean under the age of forty for outstanding original research work. Young scientists from such countries as Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Cuba compete for these prizes.

The Awardees for this year’s prizes which will be presented at TWAS Young Scientist Regional Conference in Rio de Janeiro form November 24-25, 2014 are Dr. Sephra Rampersad (Trinidad) in the field of Agriculture Sciences, Dr. Marcelo Mario Mariscal (Argentina) in Chemistry and Dr. Felipe Pinheiro (Brazil) in Physics.

Dr. Rampersad obtained her PhD at the St. Augustine Campus in 2004 and proceeded to do post-doctoral work at the International Centre for Genetics Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in Italy under the auspices of an ICGEB post-doctoral fellowship. She has also obtained training at the University of Oxford and The Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Paris, France and has presented her work at the John Innes Centre, Norfolk, Norwich, UK. She has published over twenty papers in internationally reputable journals and is the recipient of the 2006 Frank Rampersad Scientific and Technology Award for Outstanding Research in Trinidad and Tobago. Dr. Rampersad was recently selected the Most Outstanding Researcher (2013/14) in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the St. Augustine campus.