As a part of her PhD project, Sarah has been wanting to perform CLEM, correlative electron microscopy (specifically with scanning EM), to look at the oocyst wall.

This dates back to the end of Ross’ PhD project… but we struggled to find the right collaborator or facility in the UK. At a Wellcome Trust Discovery Researchers meeting, someone suggested to Mattie that we get in touch with EMBL… so we did! Shout out to Friedrich Frischknecht from Heidelberg for helping us know who to get in touch with to get started!

After preliminary discussions with the EM staff, our scientific proposal was accepted!

Sarah was awarded scholarship funds from Instruct ERIC that supported facility time, travel costs, and sample shipping.

Thanks to the following staff members for their assistance getting the data we wanted! (not listed in order of importance): Georg Wolff, Nadav Scher, Virginia Pierini, Anna Steyer, Manuel Gunkel, Rachel Mellwig, Paolo Ronchi.

Sarah traveled to Heidelberg for a week at the end of 2025, and then a follow-up visit in spring of 2026. All photos below from Sarah Stevens.

Sarah was successful with another proposal for a related, but new imaging project. Again she was awarded Instruct Eric funding, and we are planning for another trip for her to Heidelberg at the end of 2026!

It was great to celebrate another graduation with our students this year!

Dr. Grant MJ Hall came back to Dundee to be awarded his PhD! Here we are outside Caird Hall after the ceremony. So proud!

We are also proud of our undergraduate students, Finlay Walker (left) who was our Honours student and Sam Ferguson (right) who was our summer student.

Best of luck to our graduates in their next steps! And we hope you keep in touch!

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).

You can read a summary of the science HERE in Trends in Parasitology. We asked ECRs to chair each session and write a summary of the work presented during their session. Thanks Katie Walzer and Valentin Greigert for making sure it got submitted on time, and for all the chairs and authors for putting it together. If you would like a copy of the abstract book, please get in touch with Mattie directly.

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.