
Translation Manchester Travel Award: Enabling Early Career Researchers to Showcase Their Work
In 2023, our annual Translational Research at Manchester event focused on Early Career Researcher (ECR). The event brought together professionals across various research landscapes to explore the translational research opportunities offered by the University of Manchester and the support available to young innovators within our Translational Research community.

Travel Award: Conrado Guerrero Quiles
A prize- giving ceremony took place as a testament to the exceptional ECR contributions to translation research. Attendees were invited to submit an application for a travel award to attend a conference in 2024.
Dr Conrado Guerrero Quiles was the winner of the competition and was presented with the award by Professor Luke Georghiou (Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor and PI of the Wellcome Translational Partnership Award.
Conrado is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manchester and member of the Ananya Choudhury lab. His research focuses on understanding the mechanisms driving radiotherapy resistance, such as hypoxia, with a view of developing novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
The grant awarded him with up to £1,000, which allowed him to attend the ESTRO 2024 (European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology) Conference. The conference was held in Glasgow, and it is renowned as Europe’s biggest conference targeting radiotherapy-related research.
During the conference, Conrado was able to hear from leading academics within the radiotherapy research field, such as Shane Harding (Cane) and Umberto Ricardio (Italy), and join in on talks focusing on diverse areas of radiobiology. This enabled him to further his understanding in the field but also get informed about different techniques he could implement in his own research.

Dr Conrado Guerrero Quiles
Conrado had also the opportunity to present his own work on hypoxia circulatory biomarkers in bladder cancer patients, looking at gene signatures indicative of radio-resistance in the blood of patients. This allowed him to receive valuable feedback from various experts in radiobiology, including clinicians, radiobiologists, and medical physicists, which as he quoted “would have not been possible without attending the conference”.
Attending the conference also enabled Conrado to further network with experts in the field and establish new collaborations, exploring how he could combine the latest imaging advancements in the field, such as oxygen-enhanced MRI, with the circulatory biomarkers he is studying, for a long-term follow-up of these patients. Conrado quoted that “After attending the conference, I am optimistic about conducting some exploratory studies in that sense, performing some comparisons with the circulatory biomarkers we already identified.”
Conrado in his testimonial detailed that he “had an amazing experience at the conference” overall and found this to be extremely valuable and informative in terms of his current and future research. He pointed out that this had helped him to not only keep up to date with the latest advancements in the field but also gather feedback and improve the quality of the research he is developing and that it was “a very exciting opportunity”. He specifically mentioned “I am extremely grateful to Translation Manchester for supporting my attendance to ESTRO 2024.”
We were delighted to hear all of this from Conrado, and we wish him best of luck in his future research endeavours!
The Travel Grant received by Conrado was supported by the Wellcome Trust Translational Partnership Award to the University of Manchester.
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