Another year of running a successful Student Retreat for our third-year students, aided by the gorgeous Scottish landscape. Our students are telling us that it was a relaxing way of spending some time with fellow hard-working PhD students across the DTP cohort in a laid back environment. The pictures speak for themselves.
The UKRI BBSRC-funded Research Experience Placements call is now open to all second- and third-year students who wish to do a summer placement and get some lab experience.
Deadling for applications: 29 March 2019
For information on how to apply, please go here.
Please note that this scheme is currently on hold; we will update our webpages when it is live. If you have an application in development with a supervisor currently, please feel free to progress and submit that and we will update you as soon as we have more information.
The BBSRC Innovator of the Year 2019 Award competition is now open, and the BBSRC has again a category for Early Career Impact that is particularly relevant to DTP current students and recent leavers. We rely on our community to spread the word, whether that means circulating relevant information or submitting specific recommendations to highlight excellent researchers and encourage them to apply.
Winners of each of the four categories – Commercial Impact, Social Impact, International Impact and Early Career Impact – will receive a £10,000 award, with a further £10,000 for the overall BBSRC Innovator of the Year winner. Awards will be presented at a high-profile event in London in May 2019.
Further information and links to submit either applications or recommendations can be found on our website.
We are delighted to welcome our new student reps from the 2018 student cohort - each representing one of the four EASTBIO partner institutions.
Find their details here and make sure you email them to say hello!
The BBSRC Skills School ‘Broadening Horizons: Cultivating an Innovative Mind Set’ was held with great succes in Edinburgh, from Monday 4 to Tuesday 5 June 2018.
This event was supported by the BBSRC National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF).
Read more here.
For another year, the EASTBIO committee has awarded the BBSRC REP 2018 Awards.
NPIF Skills School ‘Broadening Horizons: Cultivating an Innovative Mind Set’
Edinburgh, 4 - 5 June 2018
This skills school “Broadening Horizons: Cultivating an Innovative Mind Set” has been developed by the BBSRC EASTBIO DTP and the BBSRC IBioIC CTP in partnership and close collaboration with 5 industry facilities: the IBioIC Flexible Downstream Bioprocessing Centre, Edinburgh (FlexBio); the National Phenotypic Screening Centre, Dundee; BioAscent / the European Screening Centre, Biocity, Newhouse; the Edinburgh Genome Foundry; and the Roslin Cell Therapies Ltd GMP facility, Edinburgh. It draws on expertise and know-how from these complementary partners to address industry-identified needs and skills gaps.
Event programme.
Event website.
Congratulations to EASTBIO second-year PhD student, Ms Mimi Asogwa for winning the Journal of Medical Microbiology poster prize following her contribution to the April 2018 Microbiology Society’s Annual Conference in Birmingham.
Mimi is working on a Bioscience for Health project on 'Investigating the Role of the Bacterial Mechanosensitive Channel (YnaI) in Salmonella Pathogenesis', with Dr Sam Miller at the University of Aberdeen.
Winning in western blotting at Thermo Fisher Scientific (please click on the title to read more)
by Zandile Nare
Background information
I am a second-year EASTBIO PhD student within the Institute of Immunology and Infection Research at the University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on the identification of specific inhibitors of kinetoplastid RNA editing ligase 1 (REL1), a validated drug target, for use as lead compounds for the treatment of human and animal diseases caused by kinetoplastid parasites (e.g. sleeping sickness, nagana, Chagas disease & various leishmaniases). A secondary goal of my PhD is to understand structure-activity relationships of REL1 and the other kinetoplastid ligase; REL2.
PIPS project background and motivation for pursuing project
David Walker, fourth-year EASTBIO student at the University of St Andrews (his project is 'Stress on the brain: Implications for cognitive ageing'), along with his MSc supervisor Dr Stephen Land, identified a new role for the protein, Sprouty2, a known regulator of airway branching during embryonic lung development. They found that this protein also acts within the nucleus of lung epithelial cells to regulates vascular growth of the developing lung. They conclude that nuclear Spry2 acts as a molecular link which co-ordinates airway and vascular growth of the cardiopulmonary system.
You can find the link to David's paper here.
Stevie Bain, final year EASTBIO PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, was invited by Springer nature group to blog on her research. Stevie works on Parental Genome Elimination (PGE), a unique type of genomic imprinting.
Her resulting blog - "Paternal genome elimination: investigating a strange reproductive strategy" - can be found here.
EASTBIO associate partner SULSA (Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance) is to launch in January registration for its antimicrobial resistance conference, to be held in Glasgow on 26-27 Aprilg at the Technology and Innovation Centre, University of Strathclyde.
The event will bring together a range of speakers from research, health, industry and policy. Click on the image for the event's flyer.
For further information, please see here.
EASTBIO DTP PIPS administrator Dr Caroline Pope has published a paper entitled "'Work wisdom' and the PhD: Exploring the Benefits of doctoral internships" on the Vitae website's Occasional Papers series.The article draws on research data from 65 postgraduate researchers from the EASTBIO DTP programme who carried out a doctoral internship as part of their doctoral training between 2013 and 2016. The research provides their views of emerging benefits of doctoral internships to Universities, employers and society at large.
The paper can be accessed via the Vitae website (for those who have individual or institutional Vitae membership) or found here.
Stevie Bain, final-year EASTBIO PhD student (Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh) has very indly shared with EASTBIO her blog regarding her PIPS with The Naked Scientists.
I began my three-month internship with The Naked Scientists in July 2017. As a BBSRC EastBIO student, I took some time out of my PhD at the University of Edinburgh to learn more science communication and show production.
When I began working for The Naked Scientists, my main goals were to improve my interview technique and also learn how to edit audio pieces for broadcast.
From the moment I walked into the office, I was treated as a valuable member of the team. Within the first week I had sourced news stories for the show, interviewed a leading researcher, edited this interview and published an article for the website. I loved being able to get started so quickly and found that being thrown in at the deep end is really the best way to learn these specific skills.
EASTBIO is happy to present the new Student Handbook, to be handed out to our new cohort of students and supervisors at the Induction Day (Dundee, 5 October 2017).
You can browse the contents here!
We met up earlier in Aberdeen to discuss 'delivering research to society', the focus of the EASTBIO Annual Symposium (11-12 June 2017). How apt then to receive fresh news about our very own David Walker and his latest impact podcast!
Dave, third-year PhD student at the University of St Andrews and an EASTBIO student rep (2014-2015), spoke on the 10th of June to Julie Ann Lough from NeuroEndoNow, 'the pulse for neuroendocrinologists', an impact-focused website supported by the International Journal of Neuroendocrinology. The impact case regards Dave's research, using Japanese Quails to understand impacts of pre- and post-natal stress.
Listen to his podcast here.
Hamish Todd, second-year EASTBIO student, presents Virus, the Beauty of the Beast - an interactive documentary on Friday, 30 June 2017 at The Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Viruses, in spite of the pain they cause us, are some of the most beautiful creatures in the world, covered in varied and intricate patterns - the patterns on Zika virus actually have connections to medieval Islamic art.
'Virus, the Beauty of the Beast' is a documentary, three years in the making, about the patterns we find in the shapes of viruses, and how understanding them can help us fight those viruses. It has a particular focus on HIV, Zika virus, and Hepatitis and, by using animation and simulation, it explores what the patterns tell us about viruses, but also what they tell us about the human designs that they appear in (buildings, golf/foot/zorbing balls, origami, gamma ray and neutrino detectors, alloys, and more).
We are delighted to announce the list of publications that came out of the research of our students and alumni since 2014.
Congratulations to EASTBIO students and supervisors!
Browse through the updated list of publications here.
EASTBIO successfully awarded 6 BBSRC Research Experience Placement awards to excellent undergraduate students to enable them to gain lab experience during the summer months of 2017.
More information about this year's successful projects can be found here.
The next call will be advertised in the same page no later than March 2018.
