Edgar Leite, a 2nd-year student of the Master’s in Biomedicine and a member of the i3D team at the Institute for Research in Life and Health Sciences (ICVS), received the Best Poster Award at the XXIII Professor Nicolau van Uden Yeast Biology Meeting, held on 9 and 10 October 2026 at Hotel Termas da Curia. The awarded work is entitled “Host-Derived Polyols as Metabolic Regulators of Macrophage Function during Fungal Infection” and addresses the role of host-derived polyols in the metabolic regulation of macrophages during fungal infections.
The meeting brings together the scientific community working on yeast biology and, in this edition, widened its scope to researchers studying other fungi, in areas such as genomics, biotechnology, health and drug resistance.
The event pays tribute to Nicolau van Uden, a microbiologist who headed the Microbiology Laboratory at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência between 1966 and 1991 and was a professor at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He was also responsible for creating, in 1952, the yeast collection that gave rise to the current Portuguese Yeast Culture Collection (PYCC). More information about the meeting is available at skyros-congressos.pt/leveduras.
