April 2011

Plenty going on this month!  First, Matt was invited to talk at the 2nd annual Manchester Neuroscience Symposium, which was a great day full of wide-ranging high-quality neuroscience and a chance to meet some really interesting people.  Thanks again to the organising committee for the kind invitation.

Then it was the biennial British Neuroscience Association meeting in Harrogate.  Lots of good stuff, including some fantastic plenary speakers, some fascinating specialised symposia, and of course Mark’s poster!  He got plenty of interest and feedback, and you can take a look at it yourself here.  E-mail him if you’ve got any questions (and yes, we do know about the spelling mistake in the title…)

Tom finished up his undergraduate project with us this month, producing a polished thesis and a brief talk on how, unfortunately, we failed to find anything interesting about AIS synapses in dissociated hippocampal cultures.  Still, well worth knowing, and he’s not been too disheartened – Tom’ll be back in the summer to attack something completely different (and reinstate his Matlab obsession).

Finally, April saw the arrival of not one but two new MSc project students in the lab!  Adbul’s doing a joint project split between us and Martin Meyer’s group and will be looking to follow AISs in live zebrafish, while Saj is doing some fundamental AIS biology to see if we can really pin down the location of action potential initiation.  Great to have them both on board!