Ten biologists have received travel grants from the Royal Society of Biology to help support them in overseas research projects and attend conferences abroad.

The £500 grants, available every year to students and early career researchers, cover costs of overseas travel in connection with biological study, teaching or research. Previous recipients have used the funding to travel as far as Australia and Peru.

This year’s recipients will be using their funding to travel to the USA, South Korea, and Kenya amongst other locations to attend conferences and carry out fieldwork.  

Zak Lakota-Baldwin said about receiving one of the grants this year: "Throughout my studies, I've only ever been able to read about conservation science and how it is implemented in the field.

“Now, thanks to my Travel Grant from the Royal Society of Biology, I'll be able to undertake conservation fieldwork myself in Nairobi National Park - an opportunity that I'm excited and grateful to have been given."

The RSB travel grant recipients for 2019 include:

• Gus McFarlane, a PhD student from the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, whose grant will support travel to Tarragona, Spain to present at the International Society for Biosafety Research Symposium 2019.
• Zak Lakota-Baldwin, an undergraduate student from the University of Cambridge, whose grant will support travel to Nairobi National Park, Kenya to undertake a conservation project to reduce human-wildlife conflict and aid conservation through research based activities.

Zak will travel to Nairobi National Park, Kenya (photo credit: Daily Active Kenya) 

• Owen Middleton, a PhD student from the University of Sussex, whose grant will support travel to Death Valley National Park, California to undertake a research project on interactions between a native predator and a non-native introduced population of feral donkey.

• Rebekah Butler, a PhD student from the University of Hong Kong, whose grant will support travel to the University of Florence, Italy to undertake a research project on determining genetic differentiation in the Red Clawed Crab (Parasesarma bidens).

Rebekah will be carrying out research on the Red Clawed Crab (Parasesarma bidens) (photo credit: Björn König)

Evie Morris, PhD student from the University of Southampton, whose grant will support travel to Phuket, Thailand to present at the 18^th International Bat Research Conference.

• Charlotte Angel, a PhD student from Ulster University, whose grant will support travel to Daejeon, South Korea to present at the Keystone Symposia on Small Regulatory RNAs.

• Dr Tina Joshi, an early career researcher and lecturer at the University of Plymouth, whose grant will support travel to the University of Santiago, Chile to visit one of the leading research groups in spore biology to work on C. difficile spore biology.

• Dr Karen Siu-Ting, a postdoctoral fellow from Queen’s University Belfast, whose grant will support travel to Dunedin, New Zealand to showcase work and organise a symposium on poison frog evolution at the World Congress of Herpetology.

• Dr Victoria Sleight, a postdoctoral research associate from the University of Cambridge, whose grant will support travel to California, USA to speak at the Integrative Molluscan Genomics Symposium at the World Congress of Malacology 2019 and to spend a week at Deirdre Lyons’ laboratory in California establishing new collaborations.

• Dr Atish Vadher, a laboratory technician within the environmental sciences team at the University of Northampton, whose grant will support travel to the University of Zagreb, Croatia to present at the Symposium for European Freshwater Sciences.