We are proud to announce that Thibault Viennet has been awarded the highly competitive Hallas-Møller Emerging Investigator Grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The grant supports early-career researchers with the potential to drive fundamental advances in bioscience and biomedicine that impact human health.

With a focus on bold and novel ideas, the Hallas-Møller programme empowers researchers to pursue independent, high-impact projects. The grant will enable Thibault to expand his research group and launch a highly interdisciplinary project at the intersection of structural biology, biophysics, and metabolic disease research.

Thibault’s project aims to unravel one of the major blind spots in molecular biology: disordered protein regions in kinases. Unlike well-folded proteins, these intrinsically disordered regions are not accessible by standard structural methods like X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy. Yet, they are widespread in kinases—a critical class of proteins involved in cellular signaling—and are often regulated by phosphorylation. Understanding how these disordered regions contribute to kinase regulation is essential, particularly given their implications in metabolic diseases and associated cardiovascular complications.

To tackle this challenge, Thibault’s team will develop an innovative platform to integrate a combination of NMR spectroscopy and complementary methods such as FRET, SAXS, and EPR. This integrative approach will help uncover the molecular design principles behind phosphorylation-dependent regulation in kinases, providing valuable insights into protein function and disease mechanisms.

Congratulations to Thibault on this achievement!

Tenure Track Assistant Professor Thibault Viennet
Aarhus University
Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) and Department of Chemistry
Email: thibault@chem.au.dk