June 2024
Non-clinical PhD Studentship Available
Are you interested in immunology and virology at the interface of organ transplantation. If so, the check out the following fully funded PhD opportunity available to study tissue resident immunity and the control of HCMV in the kidney with myself and colleague Reza Motallabzadeh. Closing date is 17th June - full details in the advert
Celebration in the park
We have finally decided the British Summer is never coming and so went for a picnic anyway! This gave us that chance to catch up with some past lab colleagues and celebrate some successes including Ana winning 2nd place in the UCL Doctoral School 3 minute PhD competition, Ellie being securing a PhD scholarship to study with Viki Male at Imperial and Cheril who has been offered mutiple MRes positions to continue to study viruses. We also discovered the Lucas has never heard of creme Anglaise (following a discussion about doughnuts). We also found out you have to keep your cards very close to your chest when playing Aisha at Uno!
April 2024
Microbiology Society Annual Meeting - Edinburgh
It's that time of year again - the annual lab pilgrimage and this time Ana, Ines & Al all gave excellent talks. Ana demonstrated gB fusion through the medium of dance, Ines finally got to present just a fraction of the reams of data she has generated and Al gave his first ever talk at a meeting. Not the best week for a train strike though and Prof Isla was on hand to keep the speakers to time....
March 2024
Kidney Research UK Hat-trick!
Some fantastic news from KRUK this week. Funding for a project
grant to investigate HCMV vaccines and two Sir Mike Nicholson
Awards for a post Doc to search for BK antibodies and PhD
Studentship to follow up NK tissue resident immunity work with
colleagues Reza Motallabzadeh and Alan Salama from renal medicine.
British Transplant Society Meeting
My first time at the meeting in Harrogate in order to support Steph and Fernando (from the Motallebzadeh lab) who were presenting for the Medawar prize. Both gave wonderful talks and did themselves proud. Particularly pleased with the reaction to Steph's work which is a heroic analysis of 224 samples from our generous transplant patients and, in doing so, identified important aspects of the immune response that can predict risk of BK virus induced disease in our kidney transplant patients.
Grant success! MRC Programme grant
Everybody loves more funding and we are indebted to the MRC who have agreed to support our research into HCMV latency and immunobiology. This is in collaboration with our colleagues in Cambridge, Mark Wills (Lead) and Emma Poole, and represents 5 years of programme support to understand the basic biology of latency and reactivation, a fundamental appreciation of the complexity of the HCMV immune response and how this could be harnessed to treat this important medical pathogen. Exciting times ahead.
February 2024
Two PhD vivas in Two Days!
Matt was up in Cambridge to viva Dan Greaves from the Paul Lehner lab. The viva went on a while longer than expected but mainly due to the interesting discussion! Well done, Dan!
And then it was back down to UCL for the a viva the next day and Becky! Many thanks to Doug Fink (UCL and ex-drummer of Noah and the Whale!) and Andrew Macdonald (Leeds and never banged a drum in his life!). Becky passed with corrections so well done to Becky also!
