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Jessica takes home the SPG Thompson Prize!
The Sydney Protein Group ran its annual Thompson Prize symposium last week - in which 5 PhD students duke it out by giving a talk on their work, and then the best presenter is chosen by a panel of judges to win the Thompson Prize (which brings with it glory *and* cash). This year, we had three international judges (who also talked at the symposium) who unanimously chose Jessica from our lab as the winner for her talk on the mechanism of nucleosome sliding by CHD4. A champion effort - and the first Thompson Prize winner from the Mackay lab! Not to be outdone, Charlotte snared one of the SPG Lorne Travelling Scholarships, which will nicely help fund her trip to the meeting in February....
Efe takes to the great outdoors
Just had some correspondence with Efe Isilak, a bright spark who spent time in the lab a few years ago, who wanted to let us know that much as he loves science, he felt like he couldn't spend his life in an indoor job - so of course he bought a farm! Took him a while to respond to my reply as he was out harvesting olives. I have a strong feeling that this is going go to well - but I made the mistake of forwarding his email to the lab, which invited everyone to come for a lab retreat...
Our Peppy VR paper hits the airwaves!
Our great collaboration with David Doak, Jane Allison, Juliet Gerrard and Gareth Denyer is now out in Protein Science here . Peppy VR is a Unity application written by David (of Goldeneye fame), advised on by Juliet, Jane and myself and tested in real-life teaching classes by Gareth. You can get it free here for Oculus (Rift/Quest): Peppy VR.
Have been off X for months but had to log in to see response to AF3. I am much less smart than the authors - but am I (and Erin) the only ones to think that the helical afros that it makes out of IDRs is totally weird? Am I missing something?
Amazing story from the lab down the corridor - @RezwanSidd working with Sandro Ataide and Ruth Hall in @SydneySOLES at @Sydney_Science - now they will be thrown into the gladiators' pit I suspect with the other protagonists that prowl this landscape! 🙂 Great piece of work!
Liza publishes in Nature!
After a long reviewing process, Dr Liza Cubeddu, a National Breast Cancer Foundation Fellow in Jacqui's lab, has just seen some of her work finally appear in Nature (PubMed). This paper describes a new human single-stranded DNA binding protein that is essential for...
New (honorary) lab member…
At the seemingly unreasonable time of 1:33 this morning, Thu brought a small bundle of baby girl into the world, with her husband Cuong standing (?) nervously by. She has been named Tho, and had all the expected parts on delivery (nothing worse than waiting for...
Jacqui hammers Six Foot Track
On Saturday, Jacqui and I ran the Six Foot Track ultramarathon - a particularly nasty 45-km trail run in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Jacqui had been plotting her revenge on the race since 2000, when she went out too hard and had to pull out half way. Her...
Joel has a good run
Last weekend, I raced in the Great North Walk 100-mile trail run just north of Sydney, and was lucky enough to come in third, behind David Waugh and Tim Cochrane. It was an awesome run with great scenery, and everything went as well as it could possibly have done...
Eija wins Cancer Institute NSW Award
Not only have Joel, Jacqui, Ann and Margie been busy getting grants, but Eija Lehtomaki didn't want to miss out either. She has been awarded a Cancer Institute NSW Research Scholar Award, which will help fund her research project and provide funding for conference...
More grants! Yay!
At the same time we found out about the grant towards our new NMR spectrometer, Jacqui was awarded an NHMRC Project Grant to continue some of her work on LIM domain complexes, and Margie and Ann were awarded an ARC Discovery Grant to investigate aspects of...
More megahertz, anyone?!
We met with some success in the latest round of ARC Equipment and Infrastructure grants and have been awarded $1.3M towards the cost of an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer to keep our cryo-equipped 600 company. We also have some commitments from other universities, which...
Translation services on offer!
Out of curiosity, Paul started writing the languages that people in the lab could speak reasonably fluently on the whiteboard the other day. The list kept getting longer and longer - and ended up with 20! They are: English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese,...
Joel wins Sydney Trailwalker
Perhaps even more improbably, Joel recently got together with three blokes from his running club (Jaap Bakker, Richard Green and Jonathan Worswick) and took out the Oxfam Sydney Trailwalker, a 100-km ultramarathon through the bushland of Sydney. The run attracted...
Joel wins Australian Rogaining Championships
Improbably, Joel and his rogaining partner Phil Whitten sneaked in by only 20 points (out of 2690) to win the 24-h Australian Rogaining Championships held last weekend in the Eastern MacDonnell Ranges near Alice Springs. For those of you who have never heard of the...
Lab success at East Coast Protein Meeting
At the East Coast Protein Meeting, which was held last weekend at Coffs Harbour, the lab took home more than their fair share of the prizes! Mugdha Bhati won the prize for the best student talk, and Chu Kong Liew was runner-up for the best presentation by a...
Sally II – The Return of Sally
Sally Eaton, fresh from her PhD in Merlin Crossley's lab upstairs, has joined Jacqui's lab for a period of postdoctoral work. Sally will now have worked with Joel/Dave (BSc Hons), Merlin *and* Jacqui - placing her well to decide who is the best supervisor (not that...