We're pleased to welcome Mitra Rezaei who joins us with a Chancellor's International Scholarship to do her PhD on communication between cell organoids. Mitra has a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Sahand University of Technology and an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University.

We have successfully received funding for the project "Signal Propagation and Information in Microscale Biological Applications (SIMBA)," which has been granted by the EPSRC as a New Investigator Award at a value of £313k (£392k FEC). This will be a 30-month project starting in Spring 2021 and it will establish a communications engineering framework for describing and controlling cell signalling, behaviour, and decision-making. The framework will be applied to interdisciplinary case studies of bacteria signalling and organ-on-a-chip systems. The bacteria case study will model the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in an environment with different mutants of the S. coelicolor bacterium. The organ-on-a-chip case study will model metabolic regulation between liver and pancreatic cells, as observed in an experimental microfluidic platform. The project team includes Adam Noel as PI, Christophe Corre (Department of Chemistry and School of Life Sciences) as Co-I, and AstraZeneca as an industrial partner. We will also be hiring a postdoctoral research assistant for a 2-year term.