July 2016

Adna FENS poster 2

Adna drawing a crowd…

Recent months have seen Grubb lab representation all over the place.  Matt and Elisa attended the annual FENS Kavli Scholars meeting at Chicheley Hall in April, where Elisa got to both present her latest stuff and come up with a bonkers grant proposal.  At the recent FENS Forum in Copenhagen, Adna and Elisa were kept nice and busy at their excellent poster presentations. Matt chipped in too with a panel discussion on Open Science at the CHET committee ‘Code of Conduct and Ethics in Science’ event, as well as doing lots of FKNE-based business.  Everyone got caught in the rain.  And Matt just presented at the UKSN meeting in Cambridge, in an excellent olfactory neurophysiology session.

Elisa FENS poster

…and Elisa too!

MG FENS Ethics IMG-20160705-WA0005

Matt being Open

More FKNE-based interactions resulted in Matt co-authoring another Editorial article in EJN, this time on mobility for junior researchers – you can find that here.  You can also read about our exciting new epigenetics project on the Leverhulme Trust site and on the Centre webpage.

We’ve started expanding the lab, welcoming Marcela Lipovsek to the team as a senior post-doc working on that same Leverhulme-funded collaborative neuro-epigenetics project.  She’s ordered some new pipettes already, and clearly means business…  We have more appointments to come – look out for a new post-doc position to be advertised very soon!

Existing lab members have been super busy.  Special congratulations to Adna, who successfully passed her PhD viva exam, has had her thesis corrections approved, and is now Dr Dumitrescu!  She’s also currently teaching on the CAJAL Advanced Neuroscience Training Course in Neuronal Cell Biology: Cytoskeleton and Trafficking in Bordeaux.  Elisa has been bouncing between London & Boston, not only taking full part in the April FKNE meeting and presenting at FENS, but also securing a funded position on the prestigious Imaging Structure & Function in the Nervous System course at Cold Spring Harbor.  Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for her project, she’ll now be in Boston until Christmas.  Both Chris and Darren presented well-received posters at the Guy’s Campus Postgraduate Research Symposium, and competed in the KCL heats of the Three-minute thesis competition, with Chris getting all the way to the local final!  And Candida did exceptionally well in her BSc project – so well in fact that she’s currently working with us in a funded summer placement.

GrubbLab_WeAreInternationalNotice all those foreign names in this and other News pieces?  Needless to say the entire Grubb lab was devastated by the recent Brexit vote.  Just in case we needed any further proof that leaving the EU will make it more difficult for us to do our jobs, here’s our contribution to the #WeAreInternational movement – note that Matt’s the only British person in the team, and now wishes he could be from somewhere else.  We can’t say this any more strongly – we’re still keen to recruit the right people, wherever they’re from, and we’ll fight our hardest to make sure that doesn’t change.

January 2014

DeadSea

Matt in the Dead Sea

Long time no news, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy…

Mark’s now a doctor (insert applause here), having successfully defended his thesis just before Christmas.  He also managed to present his latest project at SfN in San Diego in November, and to find himself an exciting new post-doc position in the Mucke Lab at the Gladstone in San Francisco.  But we’re not letting him leave just yet – he’s in the middle of a mini post-doc here that’ll hopefully polish off a story that we’ll look to publish as soon as we can.

In fact, Grubb Lab alumni have a pretty good track record at finding themselves positions once they’ve left us.  As well as Mark’s new post-doc job, Shivali – our MSc project student from the summer – has now started a PhD in Nottingham, while Tom W, who did a series of different projects with us a few years ago, has got himself on the highly competitive MD-PhD programme at UCL.  We’re also waiting for news from Rob, another undergraduate project student from a couple of years ago, who’s currently in the process of applying for PhDs and may even end up back in this department.

Since the summer we’ve had to say goodbye to Dutch Dennis, who got us up to scratch with our image analysis and who broke all records for Holland Masters grades (apparently).  We’ve been trying to get him back for a PhD but he’s stubbornly staying in Amsterdam for the moment.  And we had another highly successful MRes project student from the 4-year Centre PhD course – Sam learnt how to patch cultured dentate granule cells and got himself and us some publishable data within 3 months, but he’s now off sampling what the rest of our department has to offer.

The good news is that we have a new permanent member of the lab!  Elisa Galliano has just joined us as a post-doc, having got her hard-won PhD from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam under the supervision of Chris de Zeeuw.  We seemed to spend most of 2013 begging for money to bring Elisa over, but after applying for 7 different funding schemes she managed to go and get herself the very best one possible: a Sir Henry Wellcome Post-doctoral Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust!  Elisa will now be based here at King’s for the next 4 years, but will also be jet-setting to Paris, Harvard and (ahem) Oxford to do some really exciting experiments with her international band of superstar collaborators.  She’s certainly been busy so far, getting acquainted with the beauty of the olfactory bulb and putting together our new baby: the lab’s new slice patch rig.

In the meantime, Adna successfully upgraded to full PhD student status, went off to Crete for an ISN workshop where she learnt a great deal about German gardening, and presented a poster at the Cambridge Neuroscience Symposium celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Hodgkin-Huxley Nobel Prize.  Annisa’s been working hard on a project that should see the light of day very soon now, as well as being responsible for the grand new-look website, and Matt went off to a great little interactive Axons in the Desert meeting in Israel and managed to fit in a hugely enjoyable visit to the Mizrahi lab in Jerusalem at the same time.

Last but by no means least, the Grubb Lab officially rocked the MRC Centre Christmas Party this year, teaching everyone a thing or two about fashion, style, moves and scrimping by making a physical and metaphorical visit to the Thrift Shop.

Happy New Year from all of us, and here’s to a great 2014!

 

September 2010

DSC_0025aAfter a pretty quiet summer holiday period, we’re all back in the lab and moving things along nicely.  Most excitingly, late September saw the arrival of our newest lab member: a beautiful Zeiss confocal microscope.  Here she is in all her pristine glory – stunning cellular images to come as she accelerates the pace of our research no end (fingers crossed)…

And congratulations to Annisa who passed her PhD viva at the Royal Veterinary College last month!  I’ll try and persuade Dr. Chand to put up a PDF of her thesis, entitled ‘ Developmental expression and functional requirement of pituitary guanylyl cyclase-B (GC-B) and calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) in vivo and in vitro‘, once it’s all finalised.