Vesna Prchkovska, the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Mint Labs, was selected as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) IF fellow of the week on 27 November 2015 (link). MSCA is a program to provide grants for researchers and to give an opportunity to meet an international research organizations. Vesna is a reference case of the program because she successfully built her career thanks to MSCA and is currently running her co-founded company: Mint Labs.
MSCA is an attractive program for researchers. The program offers excellent working conditions and encourages transnational, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary mobility. Individual fellowships (IF), one of the MSCA offerings, include up to two years salary, research costs and travel funds. Vesna honorably received this support after a very competitive selection.
MSCA gave Vesna a lot of opportunities. She worked at L’Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS) with Dr. Pablo Villoslada in the Connect MS project and did a research visit at Harvard Medical School. Her research was boosted by a multi-disciplinary team of top researchers there and amazing equipment such as MRI.
Vesna’s research project was “‘Brain connectomics: modeling the disconnection syndrome in Multiple Sclerosis (MS)”. She aimed at analyzing structural and functional connectivity networks in patients with MS in order to improve the understanding about the organization of brain networks.