I was lucky enough to have been selected to give a talk at the 2019 EMBO workshop on DNA topology and topoisomerases in genome dynamics in Les Diablerets. This was my second time attending this meeting, and it was particularly exciting for me, as I was returning to present data that came from a new collaboration with James Provan, Sean Colloms and Andrzej Stasiak which came from the last EMBO meeting.
AFMBiomed has marked some of the most important points in my academic career, so it seemed fitting that the first talk I gave since joining the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Sheffield as a lecturer was at the 2019 AFMBiomed conference in beautiful Münster, expertly organised by Prof. Hermann Schillers.
Congratulations to Dr Bennett on passing (and enjoying) her viva, and thank you to her brilliant examiners, Til Bachmann and Carmel Curtis for making it such a great experience. Its been an absolute pleasure working with Isabel for the past 5 years - I’m excited to see what the future has in store for you.
After almost a decade, Alice is leaving UCL to take up a position at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
I am really excited to start a new chapter in my research, continuing on with all of my current collaborators, but also to find new collaborators, both in Engineering and Materials Science, and throughout the University of Sheffield. This should be made a little easier by the growing DNA presence at the University of Sheffield, which I encountered at #NAF2019, and whom I hope to meet more of through SInFoNiA.
I can’t wait to get started, and to meet my new colleagues. I’d also like to thank everyone at UCL who’s contributed to my journey there, its been an incredible place to learn and work. I look forward to visiting, I will have an honorary position there, so will be back often!
The Robert Hadfield Building, University of Sheffield
NAF 2019 was a brilliant meeting, organised by David Rueda, at the Royal Society of Chemistry. There were a series of brilliant talks, with an engaged and interested audience. Alice’s talk on supercoiling in DNA minicircles - ‘Untangling DNA, one molecule at a time’ - was well received, and she was awarded a model of the structure of the BDNA double helix, fabricated by Molecular Models. Thanks to the Nucleic Acids Group, David Rueda and his lab for organising an inspiring day of talks. We’re already looking forward to next year!
MMC2019 was a very proud moment for me, to watch my first PhD student Kavit Main, give an absolutely outstanding talk, the day after his graduation, and present an engaging clear, and stunning talk. Well done Kavit!
Alice gave a sold out out talk at London’s ‘Atoms to Galaxies’ Pint of Science event. If you missed it, the abstract is here
Our immune system relies on nanomachines, such as the membrane attack complex (MAC) to kill invasive bacteria in our blood. Our research, published in the EMBO journal and Nature Communications, provides us with a better understanding of how the immune system kills bacteria. This may guide the development of new therapies that harness the immune system against bacterial infections, and strategies that repurpose the immune system to act against other rogue cells in the body.
Alice is visiting the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) in Banff, Alberta to present our work on DNA topology at The Topology of Nucleic Acids: Research at the Interface of Low-Dimensional Topology, Polymer Physics and Molecular Biology.
If you’d like to see the talk, you can watch it here.
The cover of the newly released (March 2018) ACS Synthetic Biology highlights our exciting collaborative research with UCL Chemistry and The National Physical Laboratory
On the 10th December 2018, Kavit attended the ‘Physics of Life PoLNET2 2018 Symposium: Molecules, Mechanics, Medicine and More!’ at the University of York. The interdisciplinary symposium aimed to showcase collaborative projects across Biology and Physics with discussions ranging from evolution to epigenetics.
New antibiotics are desperately needed: without them antimicrobial resistance is predicted to kill more people than cancer. An international collaboration between scientists at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), University of Oxford, IBM, STFC Daresbury Laboratory and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has shown that our own bodies may provide an answer.
New antibiotics are desperately needed: without them antimicrobial resistance is predicted to kill more people than cancer. An international collaboration between scientists at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), University of Oxford, IBM, STFC Daresbury Laboratory and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has shown that our own bodies may provide an answer.
Kavit Main has joined the group to carry out a research project for his MSc in Cancer at the UCL Cancer Institute. His project aims to use Atomic Force Microscopy to gain single-molecule insights into supercoiled DNA-topoisomerase interactions.
Aside from academia, Kavit practises Nasta’liq and Devanagari calligraphy, Mughal miniature painting and enjoys Urdu poetry and hiking.
The cover of the current issue of ACS Synthetic Biology highlights the our collaborative research project with UCL Chemistry and the National Physical Laboratory to engineer a programmable inside-out “virus”. This everted “virus” is designed to deliver functional proteins into live cells.
