As a PhD student very interested in gene regulation who is passionate about supporting women in science, I was very keen to talk to one of the MRC Human Genetics Unit’s new group leaders, Hannah Long. Hannah has recently moved from Stanford to Edinburgh to start her own group here. I sat down with Hannah […]
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 […]
Back in March, I wrote an article for an online DNA magazine to help push the message that VIKING II, the fastest growing Viking genetics study in the UK, was looking for volunteers. It was a call to arms by study leader, Professor Jim Flett Wilson of Edinburgh University. Little did I know, six months […]
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 […]
Dr Pleasantine Mill, an MRC Investigator at the IGMM and winner of the 2019 BSCB Early Career Medal for Women in Cell Biology, discusses her approach to understanding the genetic and molecular processes that underpin cilia biogenesis and cilia-associated human diseases. Her work is funded by the MRC and the ERC. Born in Canada, Pleasantine […]
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 […]
