Final year Warwick iCASE student Alex has been accepted as a participant, with hopes of delivering a presentation, at the Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS 2022), which takes place 17-21 January 2022.

He is also an invited speaker for The Training Partnership on their A-level Chemistry on action days in Manchester, Warwick and London to ~1500 A-level students.

Over the summer, four of our PhD students began their three-month placements at the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory (the ‘Megalab’ in Leamington Spa), as part of its new pilot scheme to support the prestigious Midlands Integrative Bioscience Training Partnership (MIBTP).

The Rosalind Franklin Laboratory processes thousands of COVID-19 tests a day and, once genomic sequencing has been rolled out, will play an indispensable role in responding to new variants of concern. If the laboratory’s PhD pilot is successful, it will be offered to all five universities in the MIBTP.

See the Warwick Community Engagement webpage for further information.

Harper Adams MIBTP2020 student Camilla Preece helped to write a how to guide for the International Journal of Dairy Technology while on PIPS with the Society of Dairy Technology – it has now been published to Wiley:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/IDT%20-%20First%20Paper%20Guide%202.0-1616765345093.pdf

Ollie Odell, Birmingham 2017 iCASE student, received the Westmere Scholarship for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences for the 2018-19 academic year.

The Westmere Scholars role is to engage with postgraduate researcher communities, initiating and delivering researcher development activities and promoting the postgraduate researcher hub, Westmere.

Charlotte Cooper, a Birmingham third year student, contributed to a paper as part of her lab group and in collaboration with the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle that has just been published in Molecular Systems Biology. The paper is entitled Path-seq identifies an essential mycolate remodeling program for mycobacterial host adaptation.

Charlotte went on to present this work as a poster at the Keystone symposia conference entitled ‘Tuberculosis: mechanisms, pathogenesis and treatment’ in Banff, Canada in January 2019. She attended this event using the MIBTP travel grant.

Two University of Leicester MIBTP students, Kalina Boytcheva and Charlotte Davison, have reached the finals of the BBSRCs Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs scheme; Biotechnology-YES competition.

Kalina, Charlotte and their team (which is comprised of PhD students and postdocs from the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology) will join seven other teams from around the country to compete in the finals of the competition at the Royal Society in December.

In order to win the regional heat of the competition, they had to beat off five other teams by coming up with a plausible (although entirely invented) idea that could be transferred from a research lab to a valuable business. Their idea was to make structurally coloured cellulose for fabric from microalgae. They attended a two day workshop in Manchester with speakers and mentors with expertise in areas such as IP, tech transfer and finance to help them develop their ideas and business plan. On the third day they had to pitch their idea in a 15min presentation to a panel of 4 judges and ask for an “investment” followed by 10mins of questions; similar to “Dragons’ Den”.

2017 Leicester student Charlie Durant has been selected to visit the Department of Biological Sciences at Nara Women's University in Japan in March 2019 as part of an exchange with the University of Leicester. She will spend a week in Nara visiting the research laboratories, the university and the city.

Charlotte Cooper, MIBTP Birmingham 2016 student, has published a paper in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy as a result of the work undertaken during her PIPS placement during her training year. The paper is entitled A survey of practice and opinions on the use of topical antibiotics to prevent surgical site infection: more confusion than consensus.

Charlotte was also invited to give two talks as a result of this work; the first was at the Federation of Infection Society (FIS) conference Birmingham, December 2017 and the title of the talk was, “The use of topical antibiotics for the prevention of surgical site infection: a survey of practice and opinions.”

The second talk was entitled “The use of topical antibiotics to prevent SSI – a review of the evidence" and this was given at the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) conference Krakow, May 2018.

As part of her PIPs with Warwick Outreach, Rachel Clewes (Warwick 2016 student) wrote and published two articles in the Biological Sciences Review, a magazine for A level students.

The first article discussed Transcription factors; the second was entitled Fuel from Plants.

In April of this year, Emily Goodall (Birmingham final year student) gave a 12 minute talk at the Microbiology Annual Conference on her paper Exploitation of random transposon mutagenesis to reveal conditionally essential genes important for antibiotic resistance.

Emily was first author on a paper pubished on NCBI The Essential Genome of Escherichia coli K-12 

She was also middle author on another NCBI publication Complete Closed Genome Sequence of Nontoxigenic Invasive Corynebacterium diphtheriae bv. mitis Strain ISS 3319.

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.

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.

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.

Tommy, a 2013 cohort Warwick student, was invited by The Physiology Society and the American Physiological Society to present his experience in science communication training and activity development in Africa.