A member of the SFB 1078, Dr. Anastasia Kraskov, has been awarded the Tiburtius Prize 2022 for her dissertation "Vibrational Spectroscopic Characterization of Bacterial Phytochromes". She is in the research group of Prof. Peter Hildebrandt, the PI of SFB project B6 proteins. 

The Tiburtius Prize is awarded annually by the State Conference of Rectors and Presidents of Berlin Universities (Landeskonferenz der Rektoren und Präsidenten der Berliner Hochschulen, LKRP). She has won the second of three possible prizes which are granted to doctoral students who have received the best possible grade on their dissertation, summa cum laude. The prize money amounts to 2,500 Euros. 

Her dissertation studied the protonation processes of phytochromes, light-sensing proteins found in plants, bacteria, and fungi, during their photocycle. The study characterized Agp2, a bathy phytochrome from Agrobacterium fabrum, with vibrational spectroscopy methods (FTIR, FT-Raman) and studied the effects of amino acid substitution and pH on its photocycle. Her dissertation was the first to study the vibrational Stark effect in phytochromes and provided the first evidence for the role of local electrostatics in Pfr-to-Pr photoconversion. 

Dr. Anastasia Kraskov completed her PhD in biophysical chemistry in 2021 with summa cum laude at the Department of Chemistry, TU Berlin. She was a member of the graduate school of the SFB 1078, the IGK. Now, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the TU Berlin in the group of Prof. Peter Hildebrandt. They aim to further understand protonation dynamics in photoreceptor proteins.

She was given the award during a ceremony at the Freie Universität Berlin on 6 December 2022.