Sunday May 24th – Tuesday May 26th, 2026 we hosted the 2nd Biennial Cryptosporidium Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Mattie co-organised with Dr. Adam Sateriale, from the Francis Crick Institute. The weather in Edinburgh was incredible (maybe too good!).

It was a great chance to get the field together and discuss research progress since the 1st Biennial Cryptosporidium meeting (organised by Profs Boris Striepen and Chris Hunter at UPenn in Philadelphia March, 2024).

All the members of the Pawlowic lab came, and we had a great time catching up with old friends, meeting new people, and hearing some amazing science.

We had 85 attendees including scientists from the UK, USA, Africa, China, and Australia, and India. Thanks to funding from the Gates Foundation for supporting the previous meeting and this meeting. We had a keynote on Sunday to kick things off from Prof Jessica Kissinger from University of Georgia titled “Hybrid capture approaches enable the study of population genomics and gene expression in Cryptosporidium“.

On Monday, Sarah from our lab gave a talk about her PhD project:

On Monday afternoon before the poster session we had a keynote from Prof. Lihua Xiao from South China Agricultural University, titled “Tractable animal models of Cryptosporidium hominis infection”.

Monday night we enjoyed a conference ceilidh at Summerhall Arts Centre and family of our conference-goers also came along and danced with us!

Tuesday we enjoyed a variety of talks and ended on a session of drug discovery, featuring an update from Novartis’ progress to develop a human challenge model of cryptosporidiosis. Before the poster session, we had a presentation from Kayode K. Ojo about the Neglected Parasite Initiative and our final keynote from Prof. Wes van Voorhis titled “Bumpked Kinase Inhibitors for Cryptosporidiosis”.

Thanks to everyone for coming and making the meeting so exciting! We look forward to seeing you at the 3rd Biennial Cryptosporidium Meeting, in 2028 in the USA.

This year we welcome some new lab members:

Dr. Douglas Escrivani, previously a postdoc with Prof. David Horn (Dundee).

Dr. Sophia Hernandez, previously a PhD student and postdoc with Dr. Ellen Bushnell (Umea, Sweden).

We also welcome Dr. Sandra Carvalho, a postdoc in the Mode-of-Action team lead by Prof. Susan Wyllie, to continue our collaboration to develop MOA tools in Cryptosporidium.

To celebrate we took an updated lab photo! And we hope to have a lab BBQ sometime this summer to celebrate.

We enjoyed the opportunity to talk about our work several times this year:

Sam Ferguson was our summer student, and presented both at the summer student symposia and also at this years SPPIRIT Symposium at the Roslin Institute!

Peyton and Mattie enjoyed being hosted by Julie Tottey and the INRAE team to discuss Cryptosporidium biology and animal health. Mattie enjoyed getting to meet Aurelien Dumetre and the members of his lab and department in Marseille to discuss our collaboration as a part of our new Wellcome Trust Career Development Award.

We also were asked to present about our work on the 3Rs in Belgium. See the post HERE to learn more.

We look forward to welcoming all of our collaborators in the Cryptosporidium field to Edinburgh in May 2026 for the 2nd Biennial Cryptosporidium Meeting.

To celebration publication of Ross and Sarah’s paper in PLoS Pathogens, we spent the day at the Scottish Deer Centre in Fife. They recently received 2 capybaras and we have adopted this adorable animals as a lab favourite! We are on track to visit all the capybaras in Scotland! It was cold day, but we enjoyed seeing the birds, feeding the deer, and catching up with alumni.

We then had lunch in St. Andrew’s at Mitchell’s. It was decorated for Christmas, so it was extra cosy. Every plate was licked clean… so I think it was a hit.

Happy holidays from the Pawlowic lab, members present and past!

The 3Rs refer to “Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement” for the use of animals in scientific research. The Pawlowic lab takes our efforts to incorporate the 3Rs very seriously. Animal welfare is key to us as a group, and also at an individual level.

Recently, our team worked in collaboration with the staff technicians at the University of Dundee and were recognised for our efforts to refine our work. Specifically the group was awarded 2025 Refinement Prize awarded by the European Partnership for Alternatives Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA).

Specifically, the prize recognises a team that has demonstrated outstanding achievements in new, novel approaches to advance the implementation and/or awareness raising of refinement of animal testing.

You can read the University Press Release HERE.

A member of our group was invited to present our project and accept the award at the 20th Anniversary Conference of the EPAA in Brussels, Belgium. The lab watched live from Dundee! It was clear that the work was very well received by the members of the EPAA. Since, we have been asked to give additional presentations about our work on the 3Rs to another academic group.