The Pawlowic Lab has been hosting a WCAIR Trainee, Mr. Senyo Botchie, since July 2019. While in Dundee, Senyo has been learning the basics of Cryptosporidium culture, detection, and drug discovery.

He was recently featured on the university blog: https://blog.dundee.ac.uk/one-dundee/dundee-experience-to-help-ghanaian-scientist-tackle-parasite/

We are proud of what Senyo has accomplished while in Scotland and look forward to continuing to collaborate with him and his supervisor, Dr. Irene Ayi, and her group at the Noguchi Memorial Medical Research Institute at the University of Ghana.

Thanks to WCAIR for sponsoring Senyo’s training and the University of Dundee Global Challenges Research Fund for supporting our growing collaborative research

Congrats to Beatrice on the success of her project application to the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research. Ross provided supporting data, ideas, and writing. Beatrice was awarded £10,000 for her project. She had to win over all of WCAIR with a 5 minute “pitch”, then write a 2 page application, and present to the WCAIR management board. It was worth it though, and we’re all excited to see her develop the project over the next year!

Congrats to Emma for being selected for a travel grant from hellobio!

Emma was also awarded a conference travel grant from the Disease Models & Mechanisms and The Company of Biologists Limited.

This will support her travel to attend the Keystone Meeting “Tissue Organoids as Models of Host Physiology and Pathophysiology of Disease” in Vancouver in January 2020.

You can read more about it here: https://t.co/cY9mhFsUux?amp=1

Thanksgiving is a tradition for the Pawlowic lab, and this year we took things to a new level! Thanks to everyone for cooking and making it another great lab event.

Jack, Mike, Stephen, and Emma… with clean plates!

Ross and Steven

Beatrice and Susan

Lab Selfied (featuring Steven’s plate)

Senyo preparing the salad

Mattie’s 1st helping

Turkey!

Megan, new MMB PI

Phil

Nina

Matt

Senyo

Seal sighting by Matt during an early morning run down by the V and A Museum quickly became the highlight of the week!

Thanks to Sharon, we’re working on our green thumbs in the lab allotment behind the building. We planted a bit late this year, but are greatly looking forward to the spring.

Ali Floyd, our WCAIR Public Engagement Manager showed off his singing chops as the closing act at Dundee’s Pride Festival this year. He also helped organise another great “Street Foods” event (Mattie and Fabio take a “cellfie” with a skeleton) in between giving tours of the DDU).

Professor Annette MacLeod gave an inspiring keynote lecture at this years BCDD retreat. We learned that trypanosomes are found in the skin, the skin is a “reservoir” for transmission, and that the diversity of human genomes of African populations is understudied and under-represented. Looking forward to seeing her work featured at the exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland, free and opening in December.

Mattie attended a Fellows day at The Royal Society and got a huge surprise when she was seated for dinner with the current president, Venki Ramakrishnan!

UK Parasitology is a small world- at the Royal Society I got to spend the day with Clare Harding, a new Toxo scientist in Glasgow, and her 3 month old baby. And it was a great surprise to hear Steven Spoel, a plant biologist from Edinburgh, speak about his experience as a URF. Mattie met his wife just a few months prior when she gave a seminar to the parasitology group at the University of Edinburgh!

We have added a few lab members this autumn:

Senyo Botchie joins us from Dr. Irene Ayi’s group at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Accra, Ghana. Senyo is a WCAIR trainee visiting to learn the basics of Cryptosporidium detection, in vitro culture, microscopy, and drug discovery.

Stephen Andrews is an undergraduate student at the University of Dundee who has joined us as an Honours Student. He has become prolific at midipreps, PCR, and DNA cloning. We’re happy to have you!

Nina Svensen, a postdoc in the Drug Discovery Unit, has joined us to set up in vitro drug discovery assays.

Thanks to the School of Life Sciences, BCDD, and SLS lab managers for supporting expanded lab space for the Pawlowic Lab. We now have a dedicated category2 fecal lab and tissue culture lab. We can finally all fit in the lab at the same time!

We had a lab day out to Stonehaven, Scotland: home to Dunnotar Castle, a nice pebble beach , and a great ice cream and chippy! The east coast of Scotland can be very sunny… we all got burned! Thanks to Emma for the photos.

When you play the game of thrones, you win… or you die.

March 6th-7th we held a joint meeting of the 4th Infectious Diseases Research Meeting Initiative Scotland in combination with the WCAIR Spring Symposium. David Horn and Mattie co-organised with immense support from Catharine Goddard, WCAIR manager, and the BCDD Admin team (thanks Karen, Diane, Kirstie, Pamela, and Laura!). Special thanks to the Wellcome Trust and WCAIR for sponsoring this event and making it possible to host over 130 participants! (Wellcome ISSF funds from the School of Life Sciences)

Meeting Flier

IDRIS Meeting Programme

The meeting included talks from researchers at the University of Dundee, the University of Glasgow’s Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology, and the Edinburgh Infectious Disease Network at the University of Edinburgh. Thanks to Andy Waters and Keith Matthews for the support.

Lilach Sheiner

Jenny Regan

Alan Fairlamb shares the history of the DDU

Wiebke Nahrendorf

Richard Wall

Migla Miskinyte

Mahmood Alam

Beatriz Baragana

Thomas Otto

Manu de Rycker

Nisha Philip

There were opportunities to tour the DDU and proteomics facilities, 1-minute “flash” poster talks, an evening poster session, dinner, and a public engagement showcase.

Proteomics and Mass Spec

High-throughout screening facility

Touring the chemistry labs

The main meeting was directly followed by a satellite meeting for postdocs and senior graduate students to meet and talk with early career researchers. Juan Quintana and Joana Faria from WCAIR, received a grant from SULSA to invite the ECR speakers to Dundee and organised the entire afternoon workshop. Well done!

We hope you all enjoyed your time in Dundee and we certainly learned a lot about the exciting new infectious disease research happening across Scotland. We hope this event sparked new collaborations, grants, and connections. See you at the next IDRIS!