Congratulations to ISMB students on their successes in the past six months
2016 has already seen numerous awards and prizes for students from across ISMB research groups.
Students across research groups within the ISMB (Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology) have been recognised for their research excellence in talks, posters and fellowship awards.
Dr Doris H.X. Quay, a Commonwealth International PhD Scholar, supervised by Professor Nick Keep and Dr Sanjib Bhakta, successfully completed her PhD in 2015. She received a prestigious FEMS International Travel Award to attend and present a research poster on structure and function of two key proteins in bacterial dormancy at the Gordon Research Conference on New Antibacterial Discovery and Development in Italy in March of this year. Anaïs Cassaignau, in Professor John Christodoulou's group, has been awarded a Bogue Research Fellowship to spend 5-6 months in 2017 with Professor Joseph Puglisi, Stanford University, to develop single molecule fluorescence methods to study co-translational folding processes on the ribosome in real-time.
At this June's ISMB Graduate Symposium PhD students Jenny Booker and Matt Colledge, both members of Professor Bonnie Wallace’s group, won prizes for best first year talk and best third year talk respectively. Adrian Hodel, PhD student in the London Centre for Nanotechnology, won the prize for best poster.
Chris Earl, a finalist Wellcome Trust PhD student in Dr Renos Savva’s group, won the prize for Best Poster at the British Crystallographic Association (BCA) Winter meeting in December 2015. The poster, entitled Structural studies of a viral uracil-DNA glycosylase essential for DNA maintenance and replication, showed how the group solved the crystal structure of the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated uracil-DNA glycosylase (kUNG) in complex with DNA, in order to investigate the conformation of DNA presented by kUNG and the potential link of this conformation with a non-canonical role of kUNG in viral DNA replication. The award was presented by John Helliwell (Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester). [Chris and John Helliwell are shown in the news story photo.]
Read more news from Summer 2016 ISMB newsletter