Hello!

It has been a very busy few months up in the Brooke Laboratories. I officially started my PhD project in October and have been working almost non-stop ever since! I am working closely with a research fellow within the lab called Lynn Andrews, who is my main supervisor and so far it is going very well. We had not worked together before, however as part of my undergraduate course in Biochemistry and Pharmacology at Southampton I had lectures from Lynn, and it was these lectures which first made me very interested in asthma research. Each PhD student has at least 2 supervisors and my other one is Professor Donna Davies, who I worked closely with during my MRes year, which means that we already have a good working relationship.

The project I am doing is an extension of one of the rotation projects I did last year, so I have been able to jump straight back into it, and was even able to get an abstract (a short summary of my current work - which you then extend into either a poster or a short presentation at a conference) in for the American Thoracic Society conference which is in San Diego in May. It is extremely unusual to be able to get an abstract done within a month of starting your PhD but because of having the MRes year under my belt I was able to do it (though granted there were many late nights in October!). I have also spent this week putting in more abstracts for a national conference in Loughborough in March. It is very important that I attend conferences and get my research out there as a student as it not only helps me with my career but also so that others know what research is currently being done.

I have really enjoyed starting my 3 year project, especially because it is my project so I can have input in how I do things and which areas I focus on. Because I have a year of full time lab experience and have learnt many new techniques I have been able to make use of this. One of the main things I have been able to bring to the project is my experience using something called a FACS machine. For this you label your protein of interest with a dye and when you run it though the machine it uses lasers to detect the dye and therefore how much of your protein is within a sample (so you can see whether a treatment with a drug for example will change the amount of your protein of interest). This has been very useful because we would like to characterise the cells that I am using and this is a fantastic way of doing that, but not many people in the Brooke Labs use FACS (their work tends to focus on other things) so it would have been much harder to do without this experience.

I hope that you are all having a great 2009

Gem x