10 A niversary of IIMCB

Lab Leaders Competitions
The principles of organization of the Institute are distinct
and differ from other research institutes in Poland: an
important body of the Institute is the International Advisory
Board, acting as the Scientific Council; the leader of each
research team of the Institute is selected in an international
competition; group leader’s initial employment is based on
the “rolling tenure” mechanism; the progress of research is
assessed by the International Advisory Board after the first
3 years and then every 2 years, and the professor’s contract
may be either terminated or prolonged. There are no
permanent scientific positions at the Institute.
A history of these competitions dates back to 1998 when
the first one was resolved. The table below shows details of
each of the competitions completed to date.
According to the IIMCB bylaws, the lab leader position
constitutes an equivalent of a professorial position of other
Polish research institutes. Each competition is advertised
in Nature and other highly internationally visible sources,
including electronic media. The applicants are initially
screened formally at the Institute, and later, get evaluated by
the Selection Committee, made up of several members of
the International Advisory Board (IAB). Short-listed candidates
with the highest score receive invitations to participate
in a symposium run publicly with the participation of IAB
Competition Year Number of
candidates
Winners employed at IIMCB
I 1998 6 Jarosław Dastych
II 1999 3 Maciej Żylicz
III 2000 6 Michał Hetman
IV 1) 2000 7 Matthias Bochtler, Leszek Rychlewski
V 2002 9 Janusz M. Bujnicki, Sławomir Filipek
VI 2) 2002 9 –
VII 2003 18 Marta Miączyńska
VIII 3) 2004 26 –
IX 2005 26 Jacek Jaworski
X 1) 2005 17 Ewa Paluch
XI 2006 25 Marcin Nowotny
XII 3) 2007 16 –
members. The final recommendation is made by IAB and
passed to the Director, who is supposed to come with the
binding decision based on this recommendation. This results
in a job offer given to the winner(-s) of the competition.
The last competition, resolved in 2008, attracted to IIMCB
14 candidates, among them: six foreigners, two Polish
nationals working in USA, two Poles from UK and one
from: Australia, Finland, Germany and Poland. Dr. Agnieszka
Chacińska, who accepted an offered position, will start her
research activities at IIMCB in 2009.
Dr. Agnieszka Chacińska will join IIMCB in the early fall of
2009, after completion of her postdoctoral fellowship in the
laboratory of Prof. Nikolaus Pfanner, Institute for Biochemistry
and Molecular Biology, University of Freiburg, Germany.
She will continue work on dynamic events resulting in the
formation and maintenance of complex functional elements
such as multimeric protein assemblies and whole organelles
in the cell. Specifically she will focus on mechanisms
employed by Mia40, the sulfhydryl oxidase Erv1, membraneembedded
transporters, isomerases and reductases of
disulfides, as well as their spatial and temporal coordination
in order to facilitate the sorting of proteins residing in the
mitochondrial intermembrane space.
XIII 2008 14 Agnieszka Chacińska
1) these competitions fulfilled the MPG/PAN agreement
2) no result
3) the winner did not accept the offer
Department of Molecular Biology 17