Jonathan Smith, MIBTP 2013 cohort Leicester student, has just been awarded 1st prize at the Royal Entomological Society student awards. The completition criteria was to write an article about an entomological topic that would be of interest to the general public. Jonathan's winning entry was entitled Bombardier beetles: Superheroes of the insect world for which he won £400.

MIBTP students were successful once again at this years Warwick School of Life Sciences Student Symposium.

Natasha Dzimitrowicz (2013 cohort; pictured with her poster) won one of the best poster prizes, an award of £25. Kathryn Styles (2012 cohort) won a £50 award for one of the five best seminars as voted for by students; as did Mussa Quareshy (2012 cohort) who also won best seminar as voted for by SLS staff (an award of £50).

Harun Rashid, 2012 Warwick student, has just been awarded a Vegetable Research Fund (VRT) to allow him to attend the Plant Biology 2016 Conference in the USA this summer. The conference, organised by American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), will be held in Austin, Texas on 9-13 July 2016.

Mussa Quareshy, who is a 2012 cohort Warwick student, has just been awarded two travel grants in order to allow him to attend The International Plant Growth Substances Association 2016 meeting in Toronto.

The grants, awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Vegetable Research Trust (VRT), will enable Mussa to present his work on novel auxin herbicide discovery at the meeting.

Chris Morgan, 2012 Birmingham MIBTP student, was the winning entry into the University of Birmingham's Images of Research competition for postgraduate researchers, where PGRs are encouraged to summarise their research in a single image.

Chris entitled his image Feeding the world with plant science.  The following text accompanied the image:

As Earth’s population continues to grow, so too does the demand for sustainable food production. A large proportion of the UK’s plant science research is aimed at generating plants with new beneficial characteristics, such as increased drought tolerance or higher yield. Translating these beneficial characteristics to crop plants, such as wheat and maize, will help to address some of the problems associated with ensuring future global food security.

This image shows seedlings of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana germinating on an agar petri dish. We are using molecular biology to investigate how a special form of cell division called meiosis is controlled and regulated in Arabidopsis. By investigating meiosis we aim to understand how genetic material (DNA) is reshuffled and passed between parents and offspring in plants. We can then use this knowledge to inform and improve current plant breeding technologies, hopefully allowing plant breeders to generate novel crop varieties with desirable traits.

Matt Teft, a second year MIBTP (Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership) student, is part of a team that has won an award for Public Engagement at the University of Warwick Staff Awards.

The MIBTP is a BBSRC funded Doctoral Training Partnership between the Universities of Warwick, Birmingham and Leicester. As part of their training, the BBSRC requires students to complete a Professional Internship for Phd Students (PIPS). Matt participated in the University's activities at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June 2015 as part of his PIPS and has written a blog of his experience: blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mibtp/entry/cheltenham_science_festival

Matt is a PhD student with Dr Miriam Gifford in the School of Life Sciences working on a project entitled 'Investigating conservation of function of SCARECROW-LIKE/GRAS transcription factors and their interactions in controlling root architecture responses'.

Matt Teft, a second year MIBTP student, is part of a team that has been nominated for the Warwick University Staff Awards - in the Public Engagement Category. Matt participated in the University's activities at Cheltenham Science Festival as part of his PIPS. The awards evening is on March 11th so fingers crossed!