Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Vaccines 2023 Young Investigator Award is Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen.

Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen is a Senior Scientist and Group Leader at the University of Bern, and her research interest is focused on cancer immunology/immunotherapy. Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen works on developing therapeutic cancer vaccines, immune-enhancers, checkpoint-inhibitors, and other immunotherapeutic approaches for different solid tumors, such as those of breast cancer, melanoma, and head/neck carcinoma. She works with viruslike nanoparticles (VLPs) as an efficient platform for vaccine development. She designs and develops universal and personalized cancer vaccines, which are of great interest. She have provided proof-of-concepts (PoCs) for effective therapeutic cancer vaccines and immune-enhancers in different preclinical murine models, which have been awarded several funding grants, allowing her to finance her own research group.

Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen also worked during her Post-Doctoral period on developing vaccines against infectious diseases such as MERS, Dengue, and SARS-CoV-2. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was appointed Head of the corona-preclinical development team in Prof. Bachmann’s lab, where she worked with and led the group with great enthusiasm and published several papers, a number of them featuring her as a corresponding author. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen for her outstanding achievements.

As the awardee, Dr. Mona Omar Mohsen will receive an honorarium of CHF 2000, an offer to publish a paper, free of charge, in Vaccines after peer-review in 2024, and an e-certificate.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the many excellent nominations they were presented with.

Prof. Dr. Ralph A. Tripp
Editor-in-Chief, Vaccines