Facility Manager Lizzie Freyer works alongside Flow Cytometry Specialist Michael Rennie in a state-of-the-art lab in the new North East Building, which they moved to in April from three separate rooms in the West Building. What was your route to becoming a technician? I studied in Germany and by degree I’m a Biotechnology Engineer. I […]

Jonnie works as a Zebrafish technologist looking after several thousand tropical fish spread over three rooms on the ground floor of the Central Building. What was your route to becoming a technician? I did a PhD in Developmental Biology in Aberdeen looking at the mechanism of early eye development. When I came back to Edinburgh, […]

Helen works as Histology Service Manager in the first-floor lab in the South Building of the IGC, running the histology service for users within the university and outwith, including students from other universities who don’t have histology services and some private companies. What was your route to becoming a technician? I have been here for […]

A change in career direction saw James Iremonger switch from working as a project supervisor at a market research company to his role as a Light Microscopy Technician at IGC. He is part of the Advanced Imaging Resource team – based on the ground floor of the Central building – working alongside Head of Facility […]

Tucked away on the ground floor of the West Building, Stephen Brown and Jeff Joseph are the experts behind the in-house DNA sequencing facility providing Sanger sequencing to all IGC researchers and their collaborators. Facility Manager Stephen started working at IGC 20 years ago after completing his Biological Sciences degree and taking time out to […]

Facility Manager Alison and her Research Technician colleague Camilla Drake work in a bright south facing lab on the first floor of the South Building housing cutting edge protein, antibody and transcriptomic microarray facilities together with a family of cacti called Dr Spike Pickles, Prick Jagger, Cactniss Evergreen and Maximus Cacticus.   What was your […]

Doors Open Day 2023 marked the first outing of our new public engagement activity at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer – the Dark Genome Fish.    This project has been a fantastic collaboration between our research scientists, zebrafish facility staff and workshop and graphics teams. The result is a 4-foot model zebrafish (somewhat larger that […]

Do you have different groups you want to compare, but don’t know how? Or are you wondering what sample sizes are needed to get reliable results? There is a man at the IGC who can help with power and your analyses: Hannes Becher is the statistician at the IGC’s Bioinformatics Analysis Core Team. Hannes joined […]

As a PhD student on the MRC HGU rotation programme I’ve had the opportunity to work in the Zebrafish Facility during one of my rotations. I was very warmly welcomed into the facility and the whole team were always happy to answer questions and provide support. Their enthusiasm was infectious and I found myself really […]

Team member of the Bioinformatics Analysis Core   Science is unpredictable, but you have to ask clear and sensible biological questions before doing the analysis, rather than producing big data for the sake of it. – Suggested by Dr. Philippe Gautier (Gogo) to young researchers in the MRC Human Genetics Unit, and those who plan […]