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Charlotte’s farewell
Last Thursday we celebrated Charlotte leaving. Well, I mean we celebrated the time that she had with us, if you see what I mean. Brewdog in Everleigh was a great location - good beers, good (vegetarian) food and very long tables (just what we needed). We managed to grab a photo with Hakimeh, Chandrika, Charlotte, yours truly and Karishma too - for posterity! Charlotte is moving on to industry (nearby!) - working in a great local startup company - they are definitely going to boost their productivity now! Has been great having Charlotte in the lab - always positive and always looking for ways to get past thorny problems in her work (and a mean...
Jacqui spins it up!
Jacqui has been training at The Movement Academy in Alexandria, and demonstrated her latest act in their December 2022 showcase. Check it out if you want to see what she's been spending her spare time doing! Autograph requests accepted...
Joel and Taylor go *big* at Strathfield North Public School
Joel has been doing outreach at Strathfield North Public School for about a dozen years now - working the whole time with teacher Filomena Catanzariti. For all of those years, I've desparately wanted to run over a swimming pool filled with oobleck, to demonstrate the properties of a non-Newtownian fluid (and, after all, who *wouldn't* want to do it...). Oobleck is a slurry of cornflour and water (about 1:0.7). It pours like relatively runny pancake batter, but if you apply force to it, it becomes solid for as long as the force is applied. After a decade of the school knocking back my suggestion (largely on the grounds of messiness), a new principal gave it the green light - yee haa!!...
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!
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...
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...
Louise and the cloudy sea
Our RaPID collaborator from the Crick Institute in London - Louise Walport - was visiting this week (on her way to a speaking invitation at the Australian Peptide Conference) and she stopped in for a visit and to give a seminar. We managed to find a day with some...
Marylène est maintenant une mère
Congratulations to former postdoc Marylene Vandevenne and her husband Mathieu, who have become the proud parents of baby Alice on 27 March. I've been informed that she (Alice that is) is sleeping soundly from 10 pm till 7 am - which sounds like a great start to...
Xavier and Betsy’s graduation
Xavier and Betsy, who did Honours with Joel and Ann, respectively, graduated in May in full pomp and ceremony - and Jason got his chance to stand in for Joel on the stage - with the special floppy hat...
Michael Webster wins EMBO Fellowship
Michael, who has just recently finished his PhD at the LMB in Cambridge with Lori Passmore, has been successful in winning an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship to fund his work in Albert Weixlbaumer's lab in Strasbourg. Here, he will investigate how translation is...
Mehdi gets the big tick!
Congratulations to Mehdi, who has just received the official letter saying he has fulfilled all the requirements for a PhD! Hooray! Now, just the graduation ceremony to come!