Grant has almost finished our first in-house library screen against our transgenic Cryptosporidium (I think just 8 compound plates left!). Over his first semester in the lab he learned how to use the DDU database (dotmatics), high-throughput instrumentation, helped with a new TPP experiment, and performed several follow-up drug assays for our drug discovery collaborators.
He received an MRC Student supplement grant to travel to visit our collaborators in the Thorne lab in March to learn how to grow human intestinal organoids in 384 well plates!
Flora applied to the EASTBio PhD programme and was accepted! She will join Dr. Joanna Young’s lab, and will work in collaboration with Dr. Nisha Philip and Prof. Joanne Thompson. Flora was an Honours student, turned summer laboratory technician, turned Integrated Masters Student! We are proud of her and can’t wait to hear about her project at future parasitology conferences.
Mattie gave a talk and Flora gave a poster presentation at the 5th Infectious Disease Research Initiative Scotland (IDRIS) hosted by University of Edinburgh. SPPIRIT also hosted a session of flash-talks from ECRs. It was great to reconnect with the great parasitology network across Scotland! The last IDRIS meeting was hosted in Dundee and organised by Mattie and Prof David Horn with support from WCAIR.
Dr. Joana Faria invited Mattie to give a seminar at the University of York. It was great to get a tour of their fantastic facilities (super impressive!), get to talk with other PIs and postdocs about their research, and share a bit of our most recent discoveries on Cryptosporidium. After covid and then maternity leave, it was great to get to travel again! Looking forward to staying in touch and making many future trips to York 🙂
Simona had the opportunity to make a trip home to New Zealand, and among her adventures got to reunite with her dog, Belle.
We are hard at work post-viva turning thesis into manuscripts… stay tuned for the first rounds of papers from the Pawlowic Lab coming soon!
Pawlowic Lab 