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Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte band together to win Seed Funding Grant
Dr Jessica Zhong has recruited two other ECR colleagues - Dr Karishma Patel and Dr Charlotte Franck - to win a $50,000 reserach grant to support work aimed at developing peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) as possible solutions to the antibiotic resistance crisis. Totally awesome - and I'm pretty sure the first time *three* people who've come through the lab have been successful in a joint grant appplication! Congratulations Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte!
Varroa pesticide work hits the headlines
Unsurprisingly, there has been a significant surge in interest in Varroa mites in the last month or so, with the outbreak in NSW. This has resulted in quite a lot of publicity for our work on selective pesticides to tackle the mite, with the latest being an article on the ABC News website.
Varroa research gets a mention in Japan!
Japan's Science and Technology Agency has picked up the recent publicity around our Varroa-mite-specific pesticide project by featuring it briefly on their website. Tash will be able to read it to you!
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...
Maryam submits!
Maryam looks slightly dazed for good reason - she has just handed in her PhD thesis - well inside the time allowed. Along the way, she decided that moving country to do a PhD wasn't sufficiently challenging and so upped the stakes by becoming a mother for the first...
The latest update in our travails with the NuRD complex!
We have posted our analysis of NuRD complex architecture on Biorxiv. We firm up the stoichiometry, show that there is large-scale dynamics, partially map architecture using XLMS and show direct competition by PWWP2A that steals half the complex! It's been a massive...
Charlotte wins prize!
Charlotte Franck - who has been doing her PhD riding the line between Richard Payne's lab in Chemistry and Joel's lab - has had some payoff for the great work she's done on her evasin project, winning a poster prize at the 2020 Lorne Conference on Protein Structure...
Taylor and Rezwan get hitched (S01E01)
In the first of what promises to be an HBO miniseries, Taylor and Rezwan have completed a memorable year or so by becoming woman and husband. They celebrated with an intimate gathering of family and friends - and with extensive henna-ing! It was 48 degrees outside,...
Mehdi and Taylor (and Camilla! – and James, and Ngaio…) graduate!
The December graduation this year was a bumper crop of PhD graduates from the Science Faculty - and also a bumper crop from Structural Biology. Mehdi Sharifi Tabar and Taylor Szyszka from Joel's lab, Ngaio Smith (in absentia) from Jacqui's lab and Camilla Faoro and...
Dave Gell’s new paper featuring old-school biochemistry
Molecular Microbiology has now published the epic piece of work spearheaded by ex-lab member Dave Gell, who is now resident at the University of Tasmania. Dave had been approached by local microbiologists who noted that some strains of Haemophilus haemolyticus...
Our RaPID screening manuscript is up on bioRxiv
The project that Karishma has been hammering away at for the last couple of years - with substantial input from collaborators Louise Walport (Crick Institute, London) and Toby Passioura (now USyd) - has been somehow condensed into a manuscript and posted on bioRxiv...
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*...
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...