Two ISMB members – Dr Amandine Marechal and Dr Altin Sula – were invited to present talks at this year’s British Crystallographic Association (virtual) Meeting on 1 April (no foolin’).
Amandine Marechal gave the Keynote Lecture, ‘Respiratory supercomplexes: what can we learn from yeast?’, in the Biological Structures group Membrane Proteins Session (chaired by Professor Bonnie Wallace), and Altin Sula gave an invited talk on ‘Sodium Channel/Drug Interactions’.
On June 18th the ISMB held its inaugural Future Perspectives Day for
PhD students and PDRAs. The opening session (chaired by Snezana
Djordjevic) addressed the important issue of Open Access and the
changing landscape of research publications, and featured three
speakers with different perspectives on the subject: Nonia Pariente,
Chief Editor of Nature Microbiology; Catherine Sharp, Head of Open
Access Services, UCL Library Services; and Dalmeet Singh Chawla a
Freelance Science Journalist. The lunchtime session (chaired by Renos
Savva) on post-PhD skills in the jobs marketplace drew on expertise
from the business sector – Juliane Haupt from the Finian Group, Heidi
Kingdon Jones from IRBM and Mark Fisher from UCL Business. The
afternoon session (chaired by Adrian Shepherd) focused on the role of
AI and robotics in 21st century bioscience. Ted Meeds from Healthcare
Machine Learning at Microsoft gave a talk on the role of deep learning
in synthetic biology, Fane Mensah showed how Synthace is developing
software to facilitate the rapid design of high-throughput laboratory
experiments, and Romain Laine from the MRC Laboratory for Molecular
Cell Biology at UCL explained the ways in which machine learning is
transforming image processing in the context of advanced microscopy.
On a sunny day in June, just before the summer solstice, staff from the ISMB at UCL and Birkbeck had their (now) annual retreat this year at the London Zoo. In our busy lives as academics, these away-days provide us with the rare opportunity to catch up with our colleagues from across Torrington Place in a relaxed atmosphere and to make new friends!
We met at the Terrace Restaurant in the ‘Outback’, where we kick-started the day with tea and coffee, surrounded by emus and wallabies. Tabitha had expertly prepared maps that indicated our exploratory trail through the Zoo, incorporating show-and-tell and feeding times for maximum knowledge gathering and entertainment. Watching dragons, flightless birds, pigs and monkeys with moustaches and coatis – which is not pronounced like the garment (I learned that day), but rather co-ah-ti, gave people plenty to discuss over a very nice BBQ-style lunch back at the restaurant. We then had time to continue our short trip round the zoo to catch up with some more amazing animals before listening to the two science presentations by Drs Alexa Varah and Nathalie Petorelli from the Institute of Zoology about ‘The costs of herbicide resistance in UK agriculture’ and ‘Satellite remote sensing – a conservation revolution’. Despite the fact that our research at the ISMB is somewhat remote from these topics, there was great interest from the audience and lively discussions ensued. It was a brilliant day out, and I’m looking much forward to the retreat in 2020.
Tine Arnvig, UCL-ISMB
Flightless birds
Monkey with moustache
Men in blue
See-through butterfly
A GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) International Capacity-Building Workshop to tackle Antimicrobial Drug Resistance in tuberculosis (TB) was hosted by the ISMB-Mycobacteria Research Lab at Birkbeck on 5th July, lead by Professor Sanjib Bhakta.
Dr Clare Samson, Senior Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, has written a blog post about the event.
The Summer 2019 ISMB seminar series, Molecular mechanisms of protein folding and misfolding in human disease, coordinated by Dr Lisa Cabrita, will begin on Wednesday 24th April with the following talk:
Tuning protein biogenesis at the level of translation (and the link to disease)
Dr. Zoya Ignatova, University of Hamburg, Germany
Time: 13.00
Venue: Room B20, Birkbeck
All are welcome to attend.
The 2019/20 series of ISMB Friday Wraps continues 15th May 2020.
Speakers and titles will be announced in due course, details here.
Speakers will be presenting remotely via Microsoft Teams; an invitation link will be sent out for each session.