Let’s get this out of the way early doors; I’m older than your average bear when compared to the rest of my cohort. Heck, I think I’m older than most of the postdocs and the occasional PI too! However, I honestly believe that the only person who has a problem with this is me; I […]

In a landmark review published in Nature Reviews Immunology this week, The type I interferonopathies: 10 years on, Yanick Crow and Dan Stetson (University of Washington) look back at what has been learned since Yanick first coined the term in 2011, and how the field may develop in the years ahead. To mark this milestone, […]

I met with Ian Jackson following his retirement to talk about his career, his ideas, the changing face of science, people and the future. We sit contemplating the view over the City of Edinburgh, on the upper terrace of the Institute of Genetics and Cancer, at the Western General Hospital where Ian has worked for […]

The recent GenOMICC study led by Dr Kenneth Baillie, an Academic Consultant in Critical Care Medicine from the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, has revealed novel genetic associations with critical illness in COVID-19. As a new student at the IGMM, starting my PhD during a world-wide pandemic has been a strange and challenging experience. Nevertheless, […]

They say you should write about what you know. Asked to interview a scientist, I selected my two former supervisors. Raphaël Pantier, an experimentalist in the “wet lab” and Kashyap Chhatbar, a bioinformatician in the computational “dry lab”. I chose to interview them together because I wanted to capture the energy and enthusiasm of their […]

As someone who has studied physics for most of my academic career the world of animal models seems perplexing and complicated and the people who work in it something akin to animal magicians. But that is the world in which Dr Amy Findlay – a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MRC Human Genetics Unit – […]

In 1828, a young 19-year-old Charles Darwin commented on the regret he felt for not understanding the “great leading principles of mathematics”, as people with such an understanding seemed to have “an extra sense”. Today, where mathematics – or most commonly statistics – goes hand in hand with biological research, those who possess Darwin’s extra […]

Over six months ago, the world plunged into lockdown and virtual seminars popped up like mushrooms in autumn. Here at the MRC Institute of Genetics Molecular Medicine, the IGMM Statistical Seminar Series was set up to provide researchers more insight on the discipline of statistics. This brainchild of Dr Ailith Ewing and Dr Catalina Vallejos, […]

Making the decision to apply for and accept the offer to do my PhD in Edinburgh was a big decision for me. You might think the mere 30 minute flight to Edinburgh from my home in Belfast, Northern Ireland is no distance at all. But for me, a self-professed home bird, it’s a big jump […]

Starting my PhD in the field of developmental biology, I was very excited to attend the seminar at the IGMM by the award-winning guest speaker Cédric Blanpain, a pioneer in lineage tracing and tumour research at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. For his outstanding work in the field of stem cell and cancer development […]