So I have just finished my lab work for my 3rd and final rotation this year and it has gone very well, but now I have to spend two weeks writing the report.
I have been working with two post-doctoral research fellows, Ben Nicholas and Karl Staples. It has been a very different working environment in this lab as both of my supervisors are heavily involved in lab work, which has been great because it means I have more people around to learn from. I have been using completely new techniques for this project, which has not only been useful for my future career in research but also very interesting.
We have been working together on the same research area - seeing if it is possible to make epithelial cells (these are the ones that you can see if you look inside your cheek and a layer of these cells continues down from your mouth into your lungs) which line the lungs into more structural cells (which are found deeper inside the tissue) called mesenchymal cells. This is something that has previously been seen in cancerous tumours and we were keen to know if this is also something that happens in the lung due to disease (in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease you see an increase in these mesenchymal cells but it is not clear where they come from). We are hoping that some of this work will be published, which I am really looking forward to.
I have found this project and this year as a whole very interesting and we are now in the process of deciding what we will do for our full PhD projects. We will be more involved in the planning of our PhD than most students as we are going to spend August writing up our proposal for what we would like to do. I will tell you more about my PhD project in my next post,

Gem x