PhD students showcase projects at Graduate Studies Day
The Blizard Institute held its annual Graduate Studies Day on Wednesday 29 May.
Graduate Studies Day prize winners. (Clockwise from top-left): Fatma Coban, James Holt, Tatenda Mutshiya, Tania Corbett-Jones.
Oral presentations were delivered by our third- and fourth-year students. These covered the biomedical sciences across the spectrum and included talks on discovery science, the development of cellular and animal models of disease, to the identification of new druggable targets and how we treat patients in the trauma unit.
It’s a difficult ask to present your PhD project to a general scientific audience in 10 minutes, yet each of the talks were of high quality and we congratulate all of our speakers on a job well done.
After much deliberation, a best talk and runner up were selected. First prize was awarded to:
James Holt for his talk titled "Transposable Element Control and Epigenetics."
Second prize was won by:
Tatenda Mutshiya for her talk titled "Neurological outcome and tissue response in ageing rats in two models of acquired brain injury.”
The meeting also included a poster session 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.
Poster presentation winner:
Fatma Coban for her poster titled "Engineering a human microphysiological system of cortico-motor circuits for disease modelling and therapeutic development."
Second prize was won by:
Tania Corbett-Jones for her poster titled "Regulation of signal transduction pathways in paediatric low-grade gliomas."
Congratulations to all and thank you to our session chairs, Hemanth, Elena and Radu, and to our postdoctoral scientists Duarte, Abi, Eleri, Raju and Aoife who assessed the poster presentations.
Tania and I would also like to express our thanks to Molly for organising the day. All her hard work is greatly appreciated!
Tania and Kenny