Journey of a Postdoc | SciComm | Microbiology | Academia
Last week (23rd July) saw the beginning of another culmination event within my PhD. My attendance at the International Association of Dental Research (IADR) conference, held in ExCeL in London.…
That has always made me chuckle. And for those who are concerned, hard at work, all the time ;). But the past two weeks have been particularly super busy! Mainly in the lab. That’s a good thing I guess, in some ways at least. It means you can’t get distracted, but by working in the lab you are by definition distracted from writing.
This week, Josh and I had some tissue models come in for infections, so we grew biofilms as we do for a few days, and then infected the tissue models. All 72 of them!!
Luckily we can …
What a great visit. The past two days have been some of the most fun moments you can possibly have in science I’m sure.
It’s that time of year when GSK very kindly host their annual student science symposium. Once again the evening poster session and dinner was held in the beautiful Oatlands Park hotel in Weybridge, then the next day on to the GSK Oral Healthcare base.
The evening poster session was once again full of great science from early stage PhD students (and Jonathan who despite being a third year, did a poster as well as his oral …
What a great week!
This week saw three of us from DENTL attend the Oral Microbiology and Immunology Group meeting at Gregynog Hall. Josh, Zahraa and I drove up (in a beautiful Toyota Verso) with no navigational problems this time round – after taking more than twice as long to get there last time because of a battery issue with phone leading to no sat nav, and no maps!!)
Upon arrival it was great to catch up with David B and Jon from GSK, Marcello and Dave S (OMIG committee) and the others.. We then attended the post-PhD career talk …
What a week!
It didn’t feel particularly busy, because working with cells means a lot of waiting for them to…well, grow. It’s all the little bits that seem to add up and make what seems like it should be an average week, into a very not average week.
Did some flow work at the start of the week which showed the new antibody I bought in worked :D. I also had another clinical sample – a stomatitis one this time too, so excited to see what comes back off the plates for isolated bugs..and need to sort the DNA extraction …
Today I headed downstairs to the labs and bumped into Josh (friend of mine in my research group), and as we’d both submitted an abstract to OMIG for this year’s meeting, I suggested that we may hear sometime this week – as last time the response was about a week after the submission deadline.
Anyway, we had a chat and I said for him to keep an ear out toward the mid-and of the week for any news. Low and behold, literally two hours later, we received the notification email!
Both of us had received the same email stating we …
So..been a while since my last post!
Whats happened since?
2014:
– I attended OMIG at Gregynog, which was my first conference. I presented a poster and won the poster prize! #Win
– I completed the MEDIC SSC project with grate success
– I attended the MITReG Conference in Cardiff and won second prize for my poster
– I passed my first year progress monitoring with no problems 😀
2015:
– A paper on which I was second author was published int he journal Biofouling. It encompasses my first years work and having spent an amazing year working with Yuri …
I really dislike PCR. There. I said it.
OK, maybe I don’t really dislike PCR, but I don’t like when experiments don’t work. I find it hard to acknowledge the fact that doing a PhD is 10% intelligence and 90% persistence..life is very different in industry; if it doesn’t work, you leave it, or try one other thing to make it work.
Academic research is very different.. it brings to mind the phrase “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”. However, I had made a monumentally ridiculous transcription error (see what I did there!). Having had …
Monday morning came too quickly this week. Sat (what I hope to be) the last exam for he foreseeable future; Biomedical methods research techniques, and honestly..it was hard work! A lot about protein work, cell culture, bioinformatics but very little microbiology (one page of twelve total!) so not a particularly equal spread of questions over the course! Such a shame..but fingers crossed now until the results.
With the dreaded exam over, the rest of the week should really have been easy going – just get on with in vitro biofilm growth, confocal analysis on Wednesday, start again on Thurs and …