Tag: students

April 2012

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Transition time in the lab right now.  Adna, Rob and Tom all did a grand job of polishing off their respective projects this month, having all produced some really useful data.  Thanks guys!  But we’re not quite down to a skeleton crew because Rosie just joined us on an MRes rotation on synaptic scaling.  She’s got mini recordings already, so things are looking good…

Of the more permanent lab members, Matt went to Goettingen recently to visit Andreas Neef’s lab, giving a talk, getting his hands dirty in the lab and talking a lot of extremely interesting theoretically-biased action potential biology.  Hopefully there might just be some fruitful collaborations there in the future.

Back in London, Annisa’s been working hard at taking her in vitro findings in vivo, while Mark’s still grappling with signalling pathways.  The biggest news, though, is the sausage-making kit we got Mark for his birthday (pictures to follow soon!) – we’re expecting gourmet butties very very soon…

January 2012

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It’s taken us a while to warm up this year, but the lab’s now properly back in business with data flooding in all over the place.  This is not least because of two new arrivals: Adna’s patching like a professional already, and Rob’s getting thoroughly into his AIS analysis (see Students page for more details).  And because of Matt’s shameful absence from the otherwise stellar Grubb lab showing at the departmental Christmas FancyDressFest, we treated ourselves to a team non-Christmas dinner this month – you can ask Tom whose curry was nicest because he finished all of them off…

November 2011

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Sabrina

Sabrina

The main event this month was the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington DC.  Matt co-chaired a minisymposium on ‘Short- and long-term plasticity at the axon initial segment’ which brought together six young(ish!) researchers to present their recent AIS work, and which was a huge amount of fun – lots of fresh data, some great talks, some lively questions, and a brilliant opportunity to spend some time talking science with others in the field.  Thanks to everyone who contributed and to everyone who came along, especially those who spared the time to chat to us afterwards.  The minisymposium also spawned a little cross-continental state-of-the-art review in the Journal of Neuroscience, which you should be able to read here.

Not forgetting the rest of the lab, Annisa and Mark were in DC, too.  When we weren’t eating half-smokes or getting shot at, we were busy presenting two well-received posters which you can see here (Annisa, Mark).  Thanks again to all those who took the time to come and talk about olfactory bulb and hippocampal AIS plasticity – we left the meeting with some extremely useful contacts and a lot of good feedback.

And while we’re in conference season, we just heard that Sabrina – our summer student from UC Irvine – presented her work at the ABRCMS meeting in St. Louis and came away with a poster prize.  Jolly well done Sabrina!

September 2011

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The last couple of months have been a period of great collective achievement in the Grubb lab.  Here’s the summer student roll-call: Saj and Abdul both successfully polished off their MSc projects, and both managed to get Merits overall, which we’re dead proud of.  Sabrina sadly had to return to life in sunny Southern California, taking with her a new-found love for booze, British comedy and golf ball rolling (don’t ask), but leaving behind new ways for us to label cell types in our hippocampal cultures.  Tom used his charity money very wisely, learning how to patch and getting some nice data on structural AIS plasticity.  He’s now busy becoming a real doctor, but is still popping in now and again as part of his ‘Student Selected Component’.

As for the permanent team members, Mark finally persuaded enough people to read his PhD Upgrade report so that he can transfer to full doctorate pursuit status, Annisa presented her data at a one-day Imperial College symposium on ‘How to Succeed in Science’ (think we all should’ve gone, really), and Matt managed to submit an MRC Research Grant that’ll hopefully expand us in all the right ways next year.  Fingers crossed!

July 2011

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Our latest student team member joined us this month: Sabrina’s visiting on a 2-month project from UC Irvine, working on AIS plasticity in different classes of hippocampal cells.  She’s also been busy finding neurons wherever she looks.  In fact, there’s been a spate of unlikely-looking biology either discovered or created by the lab recently, and it’s all on show here.

Matt didn’t show any of these images, but he did present a poster at the excellent IBRO meeting in Florence this month (PDF here), where some new contacts and interesting presentations made for 4 days full of quality science.  He was also invited to give a seminar at the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, which was fantastic for building links with other UK AIS researchers.  We’re hoping for some fruitful collaborations out of those interactions, so watch this space.

June 2011

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First, an apology.  Having moaned about the lack of interest in the SET for Britain event in March, Matt now has to eat his words.  Our workplace MP Simon Hughes, a rather busy man, found time this month to have a chat with Matt at the House of Commons about our work, the MRC Centre, and student fees, and has provisionally arranged a lab visit in August!  Great to know someone’s listening.

Earlier this month the Wellcome Trust, who fund our research but also put a lot of money into public science communication, invited Matt and a group of other scientists to take part in DocFest, a documentary film festival/conference up in Sheffield.  A really different and fascinating couple of days – not only some great films, but also an opportunity to interact with filmmakers and commissioners about how to tell factual stories well, and how to fund your project.  Matt now has a new-found respect for anyone brave/mad enough to launch an independent documentary film-making career!

And finally, not content with getting a first in his finals, Tom rounded off an excellent week by securing funding from Dravet Syndrome UK for a two-month summer studentship.  Now he just needs to learn how to patch…

April 2011

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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!

February 2011

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We’ve had a good few productive months since the last post, with everyone getting their heads down, battling the frost & snow, and coming into the lab to produce some really exciting preliminary data on all projects.  We can’t reveal any details just yet, but watch this space!

We’ve also got a new lab member: in between training to become a ‘proper’ doctor, Tom Watkins has joined us for his intercalated BSc lab project, looking at synaptic inputs to the AIS in hippocampal cultures.  He’s already re-worked our standard Matlab scripts and acquired a big stack of confocal pictures, so there should be some of his images up in the Gallery soon…

Finally, we’ve just heard that Matt’s going to be co-chairing a minisymposium at this year’s Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington DC (November 12-16).  It’s titled ‘Short- and long-term plasticity at the axon initial segment’, and will involve talks from six young(ish) researchers interested in various aspects of AIS plasticity.  More details to come, but save the dates!

July 2010

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Mark finished his 1st-year PhD lab rotation with us this month, looking at the effects of GABAergic neurotransmission at the axon initial segment (AIS) in primary neuronal cultures.  If you’re thinking about using caged GABA to study function at specific GABAergic synapses, you might find his report pretty interesting…

Download Mark’s project report here