Ikhlaas Kasli, a member of the 2013 MIBTP cohort, has been awarded the 'Professor Alice Roberts Award for Public Engagement’. This was based on the public engagement activity which Ikhllas and his team ran on the 20th Feb 2015 at the Birmingham Think Tank. The exhibition was called 'Clever Microbes" and sought to understand the public perception of the role microbes play in everyday life. It also generated awareness about how important these microbes are in society, from being used in our food to the production of therapeutics.

Congratulations to Ikhlaas.

Mike McLeod (2013 cohort) and his team Health Kicks, won the 2015 Post-graduate Enterprise Summer School. The school was commissioned by the West Midlands based social enterprise, Health Exchange, in partnership with the University of Birmingham.

This involved an intensive consultancy project; the aim was to develop an app to improve health, which was then pitched to a panel of judges. The pitch included the value proposition, the market, finance, sales strategy and the app concept. Mike really enjoyed the experience and was working within a great team. He said that he would highly recommend the PESS to any other postgraduate students.

2012 MIBTP student Stephan Grambauer has just had a paper publised in the scientific jounrnal Parasites and Vectors. The paper is entitled Identification of candidate mimicry proteins involved in parasite-driven phenotypic changes.

Stephan Grambauer of the first MIBTP cohort has been awarded a travel grant to give an oral presentation at "8th International Conference on Stickleback Behavior and Evolution" at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA in July 2015.

Harun Rashid of the first MIBTP cohort has been awarded a Vegetable Research Trust (VRT) fund for 2014 / 15 to participate in the International Symposium on Edible Alliaceae in Turkey, 2015.

MIBTP students won three out of the five best poster awards at this year's University of Warwick, School of Life Sciences Student Symposium.

Michael Baker, Harun Rashid and Mussa Quareshy, all from the 2012 cohort each received £25 in prizes.

2012 cohort student Harun Rashid was recenly named first author in a published article based on his MSc work entitled "Low-dose gamma irradiation following hot water immersion of papaya (Carica papaya Linn.) fruits provides additional control of postharvest fungal infection to extend shelf life" The paper was published in the International Journal for Radiation Physics.

On the 20^th February, five members of the School of Chemical Engineering (Ikhlaas Kasli (MIBTP 2013 cohort), Alfred Fernández-Castané, Nurul Asma Hasliza Zulkifly, Charles Moore-Kelly and Stephan Joseph) undertook a day of public engagement at the Thinktank Science Museum in Birmingham.

The exhibition, called ‘Clever Microbes’, sought to understand the public perception of the role microbes play in everyday life. It also generated awareness about how important these microbes are in society, from being used in our food to the production of therapeutics.

Members of the public got involved in experiments growing bakers yeast and capturing the evolved carbon dioxide as the yeast grew and respired, the same process which occurs in bread making. This was then related to the work researched in Chemical Engineering (and also taking place in industry), where these principles are being applied to produce medicines.

The public also saw how these medicines are purified, by running an experiment using thin layer chromatography. They separated out the different coloured dyes from M&Ms using chromatography paper and water.

Finally, there was a microscope, which allowed visitors to see microbes and understand how small they really are.

The exhibit appeared to be enjoyed by the volunteers and museum-visitors alike, with both sets of people engaging in discussion and learning from the interaction.

2013 cohort student, Elise Facer-Childs, has recently had a paper published on www.cell.com 

The paper, entitled The Impact of Circadian Phenotype and Time since Awakening on Diurnal Performance in Athletes has attrached much interest globally. It has been written about in hundreds of articles across the world (including The New York Times, New Scientist, AAAS Eurekalert, The Times, The Telegraph and the NHS website to name a few) and Elise and her co-author Roland Brandstaetter have been invited on to live radio in America, Germany, Singapore, Ireland and here in the UK to discuss the paper.

Elise also spoke about her findings on BBC breakfast; the video for which can be viewed on the BBC News website.

Lauren Jones, a member of the 2013 cohort, has been awarded a gold sponsorship from Primerdesign.

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. Projects are assessed and a number of sponsorships awarded on merit.

As one of this year's winners, Lauren has been awarded a Gold level of sponsorship which includes over £3000 worth of reagents and products, as well as additional discounts and hands on technical assistance and training from our experts.

Further information can be found on the Primerdesign website.

Michael Baker, from the 1st MIBTP cohort, was recently published as co-author in the American Journal of Physiology with the paper - α-1-Antitrypsin variants and the proteinase/antiproteinase imbalance in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The paper is as a result of his first mini-project, during his training year on the programme.

Mussa Quaresy recently took part in a course at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton. Participants for the course are selected based on an application rather than first come first serve basis. Mussa said that the course was very interesting and well organised, with training from the people that actually curate the databases and who are experts in their fields. Mussa also presented his work on drug design for novel auxins.

Ikhlaas Kasli, first year MIBTP PhD student was awarded a grant to attend the 11th Annual bioProcessUK Conference in Liverpool, on the 25-26th November.

Zoe Lonsdale, MIBTP 1st year PhD student has been selected to visit the Department of Biological Sciences at Nara Women's University (Japan) in Spring 2015 as part of a Leicester–Nara Exchange Agreement. She will work with Professor Shin-ichi Iwaguchi and his group, exploring epigenetically controlled phenotypic plasticity. Her visit will also include giving a research seminar, visiting the research laboratories, and meeting with staff and students to discuss the research at Nara and Leicester to hopefully lay the groundwork for collaborations.

MIBTP second year PhD student Andrew Gilbert has had a first author publication in the Cold Spring Harbour Perspectives in Medicine monthly online publication.

He has also gained a co-author publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.