News

Sophie Martucci (2015 Warwick student) has been nominated for a Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE) award for her teaching within the School of Life Sciences. The awards recognise postgraduate students who have enhanced the student experience by motivating, inspiring and engaging with students and who have created a supportive learning environment that recognises diverse student needs. The winners will be announced w/c 25th June. Best of luck Sophie.

Jon Price, Warwick 2014 has recently had a paper published as a result of the mini-project that he undertook during his training year. The project was under the supervision of Dr Eamonn Mallon at the University of Leicester and the paper was published in Molecular Ecology.

Jon was also awarded a prize of £50 at the 2018 Warwick Postrgraduate Research Student Symposium; he was voted as giving one of the top five seminars.

Dave Booth, who is in the second year of the MIBTP programme, will speak at a conference, Innovations in Urban Agriculture, in Brussels later this month. The conference, a colloboration between Harper Adams and the University of Birmingham, will be attended by a mixture of researchers, companies and EU delegates; the subject matter is recent innovations in vertical farming and the current trends in urban agriculture. Dave's talk will discuss resource availability and its use in urban environments; he will also be promoting PhD and research projects that are partnerships between universities, as his own project is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Harper Adams.

Jenna Lam, Warwick 2015 student, received the Silver award at the 2018 PrimerDesign competition. Every year Primerdesign sponsors a number of postgraduate students across the UK to help with their research by actively promoting good science and providing some free, and some discounted, high quality Real-Time PCR reagents. As part of the award, Jenna will receive 20% off all PrimerDesign products. Further information on the PrimerDesign Postgraduate Sponsorship scheme can be found on their website.

Poppy Sephton-Clark, Birmingham 2015 MIBTP student, has recently had two publications. The first paper Poppy contributed to is entitled Vomocytosis of live pathogens from macrophages is regulated by the atypical MAP kinase ERK5; it can be viewed on the Science Advances website.

The second publication, in Advances in Applied Microbiology, where Poppy is listed as joint first author, is entitled Spore Germination of Pathogenic Filamentous Fungi.

Charlotte Cooper, MIBTP Birmingham 2016 student, contributed to a paper which has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The paper, entitled Structural and functional determination of homologs of the Mycobacterium tuberculosisN-acetylglucosamine-6-phosphate deacetylase (NagA), was as a result of Charlotte's mini-project, undertaken at the University of Warwick during her training year. The paper can be viewed found on the JPC website.

Second year MIBTP Birmingham student Rachael Grime (left) has been awarded a grant from the Birmingham-Nottingham Centre for Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE). Rachael’s grant will enable her to visit Nottingham to carry out fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) on G protein-coupled receptors purified in SMALP nanodiscs. She will be aiming to determine binding kinetics of some fluorescent ligands to G protein-coupled receptors.

Rachael is pictured at the recent COMPARE Launch Event in Nottingham, with supervisor Mark Wheatley and former Wheatley lab member Denise Wootten.

Cerys Currie, a Warwick MIBTP student who is in the second year of her PhD, has been named BSCB Young Cell Biologist of the Year.

To win this title; Cerys, who is supervised by Professor Jonathan Millar and Dr Andrew McAinsh in Warwick Medical School, presented a poster entitled Eludicating the role of Bub1 in human checkpoint signalling at the recent British Society for Cell Biology (BSCB) meeting in Manchester. As part of the award, Cerys will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) conference in San Diego, USA later this year.

Thomas Karikari, Warwick 2013 cohort, has recently began a visiting fellowship at the Walsh Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, USA.

A recipient of awards from the Royal Society, the Company of Biologists, the Physiology Society and MIBTP, Tommy joined the lab in August 2017 to investigate the effects of tau aggregation and spread on neuronal viability and neuritic morphology.

Thomas Karikari, 2012 Warwick student and recent MIBTP graduate, has been been invited to serve as a Guest Editor for a special Issue on International Science Education for the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, published by the American Society for Microbiology. Thomas is one of five experts in international science education who have teamed together to solicit, review, and organize a special issue centered on this topic.

Further details can be found on the American Society for Microbiology website.

Yijun Zhu will receive the 2017 University of Warwick School of Life Science Faculty Thesis Prize for her thesis entitled: “Genetics and molecular mechanism of trimethylamine N-oxide demethylase of Methylocella silvestris BL2”.

Yijun was a student in the first MIBTP cohort who have just completed their PhD.

Congratulations to Yijun.

Mussa Quareshy will receive the 2017 University of Warwick School of Life Sciences Thesis Impact Prize for his thesis entitled: “Towards understanding chemical perception and selectivity for TIR1 and AFB5 auxin F-Box receptor family members in Arabidopsis.”

Mussa was a student in the first MIBTP cohort, who have just completed their PhD.

Congratulations to Mussa.

In 2016, Thomas Karikari, Warwick 2013 student, won the best poster award at the Alzheimer’s Research UK Midlands Conference.

As well as undertaking his PhD, Tommy has also been involved in organising and teaching at international courses and has organised, and continues to be involved in, several outreach activities in Africa.

Thomas Karikari of the 2013 cohort, based at Warwick, has been awarded numerous grants over the past year.