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Ana strikes out in a brave new direction!
After quite a few years of being an invaluable member of the lab - and one of the only people I know who have solved structures by NMR and crystallography - and done EM as well - Ana has decided to step out of academia into the scary real world. She has done it by tooling up as a web application developer in her spare time - and she instantly became a hit - securing a job with the web development company Hypothesis. So far, she is really getting a buzz out of it - very exciting - and remarkably painless! It seems that those skills developed as a science PhD turn out to be valuable in other places - who would have thought!
Ingrid and Percy get (secretly) hitched
Ingrid Macindoe - postdoc in the Mackay lab - has recently tied the knot with her beau in a low-key ceremony - and with the most awesome cake! Congratulations Ingrid!
Funding opportunities for ECRs
Here is an amazing resource put together by some folks at Johns Hopkins, showing funding opportunities (and travel grant opportunities) for PhD students, postdocs and ECRs: Early career faculty funding opportunities Postdoc funding opportunities PhD funding opportunities And here is a short article about it in Nature: Nature article on ECR funding database...
Wanted: postdoc biochemist/structural biologist to work with Richard Payne, Sydney/US startup INSAMO (and me). Goal: use cyclic peptide mRNA display to design cell-permeable peptide-based protein degraders: https://usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/USYD_EXTERNAL_CAREER_SITE/job/Darlington-Campus/Postdoctoral-Researcher-in--Peptide-Based-Drug-Discovery_0131612-1
Email for more info: joel.mackay@sydney.edu.au
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?
This is supercool, but it does like folding everything, even things that are probably disordered... As always, use with caution, and consult your friendly structural biologist before investing too much in low confidence predictions.
Jacqui’s LIM complex structure used as eye candy!
The new Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine (LIMM - nice...) has a vert attractive logo on their website! Can you pick which structure it is?
The 800 MHz spits out its first HSQC!
Woo-hooo - the new Bruker Avance 3 800-MHz NMR spectrometer recorded its first 15N and 13C HSQC spectra today, so we have taken our first steps in the ultra-high-field world. Exciting! The cryosystem and probe will be installed over the next 10 days or so, and then...
Mugdha and Ingrid blitz the Lorne Conference!
Mugdha and Ingrid both won poster prizes at the recent Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function for their presentations on LIM homeodomain and hydrophobin proteins, respectively. Miriam-Rose Ash and David Jacques from the crystallography side of the...
Ann appointed as NMR Instrument Manager
Ann has finally given in to her desire to work in or near a workshop and been appointed as our new NMR Instrument Manager. In this, she follows in the footsteps of Dr Bill Bubb, who did an excellent job of keeping our 400 and 600-MHz instruments in tip-top...
Ann wins ANZMAG Young Investigator Award
Ann was awarded the Young Investigator Medal from the Australian and NZ Society for Magnetic Resonance. This medal recognizes an outstanding contribution to the field of magnetic resonance in Australia and New Zealand, by a researcher who is less than 38 or is less...
Joel wins 100-mile race!
On the weekend, Joel ran in the Great North Walk 100-miler, run (oddly enough) on the Great North Walk between Newcastle and the northern reaches of Sydney (Patonga). Improbably, he crossed the line first in 26 h 31 min - his first ever win in a solo race. Soon he...
Fellowship success
Not only will we be able to buy tips, but Joel and Jacqui will also be able to feed their cats next year. Both of us have secured NHMRC fellowships (SRF B level) to keep us off the streets for the next five years. What a relief!
Grant success
Hooray - we will be able to buy pipette tips next year! Joel was awarded two ARC Discovery Grants and Jacqui one. Joel's two projects are focused on (a) new functions for zinc finger transcription factors (in collaboration with Merlin Crossley) and (b) novel...
Robyn wins a prize at ComBio 2008
Robyn showed them what she was made of at the recent ComBio conference in Canberra, winning a poster prize for her presentation on the peptide-binding properties of PHD domains. Congratulations Robyn - well deserved!
Wendy on the radio
Wendy Yung, an MSc graduate from the Mackay lab, appeared on ABC National Radio the other day. Wendy has been working at Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, for a number of years now, and travels around the country with their science roadshow,...
Mudgha is in the money…
Mugdha Bhati, a smiley PhD student from Jacqui's lab, has been busy winning prizes and fellowships to attend a couple of crystallography conferences. She was awarded a Maslen scholarship from the Society of Crystallographers in Australia and New Zealand to go to...
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...