June 2013

Mark emerging from the darkness

Mark emerging from the darkness

We’ve been out and about recently, taking our science to the Great British public.  At the Science Museum, Matt volunteered on our Centre’s stall in the recent Life Game exhibition, explaining how messing around with neuronal activity might help us tackle serious diseases.  Then there was the MRC Centre Science Spectacular evening, held in conjunction with the ‘Photo51: From DNA to the Brain’ exhibition at Somerset House.  Here, Matt & Mark ran a surprisingly successful live demo of optogenetic activation plus calcium imaging, and you can see a lovely clear picture of Mark in front of our giant results screen here!

Mark and Adna also presented at the recent Tri-Divisional PhD Day, with Adna being highly commended on her poster and Mark scooping joint first prize for his excellent 3rd-year talk.  Well done guys!

And finally we have another new recruit to the lab: Dennis Kruijssen, who’s joined us for a few months on an internship from his MSc course at the Vrije University in Amsterdam.  He’s already got properly stuck in to his experiments, and has introduced us to some truly disgusting licorice, so it’s ups and downs so far…