PhD students showcase projects at Graduate Studies Day

First-prize talk winner, Adrian Rodriguez (right) and second-prize talk winner, Abubkr Ahmed (left)

Oral presentations were delivered by 10 of our third- and fourth-year students. These covered an impressive spectrum of the biomedical sciences ranging from determining the impact of nutritional supplementation in children suffering co-morbidities of TB and malnutrition, to the use of patient stem cells to develop an in vitro model of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy for investigation of cross talk with endothelial cells of the vasculature.

It’s no easy task to relate your PhD project to a general scientific audience in 10 minutes, yet each of the talks were of excellent quality, the responses to questions were thoughtful and insightful, and I congratulate all of the speakers.

After much discussion, we managed to select a best talk and runner up. First prize was awarded to: 

Adrian Rodriguez (working with Diego Villar in Genomics and Child Health), for his talk titled "Investigating the epigenomics of Atrial Fibrillation using human atrial samples and in vitro iPSC models." 

Second prize was won by:

Abubkr Ahmed (working with Emanuel Rognoni in Cell Biology and Cutaneous Research) for his talk titled "Dissection of the molecular and cellular heterogeneity of dermal fibroblasts in skin fibrosis.”  

First-prize poster winner, Sanjana Ananth (right) and second-prize poster winners, Nicola Dark (left) and Federica Mossa (middle)

The meeting also included a vibrant poster session delivered by our second-year PhD students. Excellent engagement and enthusiastic discussion of the projects were reported by the judges which is the fundamental aim of a poster session, so well done all. For the posters themselves, we were looking for a number of features including, but not limited to: visual appeal, good use of graphics, limited amount of text, good flow of information with easy identification of the hypothesis/aims, and take home messages.

It was a tough competition to score but we felt the poster and discussion by Sanjana was excellent. 

Poster presentation winner:

Sanjana Ananth (working with Silvia Marino in Genomics and Child Health) for her poster titled "SYNGN integrative model to investigate the function of novel long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in Glioblastoma.”

And two runners up that were impossible to separate:

Nicola Dark (working with Paul Armstrong in Immunobiology) for her poster titled: "Influence of platelets on monocyte phenotype and function.”

And:

Federica Mossa (working with Cleo Bishop in Cell Biology and Cutaneous Research) for her poster titled: "Uncovering the role of proteasomal dysregulation in cellular senescence and ageing.”

Congratulations to all,

Professor Kenny Linton