Hello again!,

I thought I would give you a bit more insight into the life of a PhD student.

As well as working on my current project, I have recently also been working with Karl and Ben (who I did my last rotation with) writing up the work that I did with them into a paper. For each of our rotations we had to write a report and this paper has been an improved version of that so it is very exciting thinking that soon my work could be in print! Although I am no longer working in their lab, I am just across the corridor so it is easy to pop over and get everything sorted during a (well, many!) coffee break (and of course it is good to continue to collaborate).

Writing up a paper is quite a slow process as there are three of us working on it, so there were many, many corrections and changes in grammar (literally arguing over commas!) before we were all happy! We have sent it now to Ratko Djukanovic (I have just noticed that there is a link on the AAIR website to a page about Ratko so you can see who I mean!) who is the boss of their lab (as well as the research division) for his approval and comments. He will be able to guide us with regards to which journal he thinks it would be most appropriate for, and of course has the final editorial approval. This is the first time I have written a paper and it has been a very interesting process. I can't get too excited yet because you have to go though many stages of approval before it is published, but I sometimes can't help myself!

In December I was lucky enough to be able to attend the British Thoracic Society conference in London. There were many interesting talks and I was able to meet other researchers in my field. This was especially useful because some of the talks I went to were on EMT (epithelial to mesenchymal transition – the idea is that in the right situation epithelial cells (the ones lining your airways) can change into more structural muscle-like cells) research. This is what the paper is about, so I was able to ask questions to find out exactly what other people in the field are doing at the moment and how their research fits in with ours.

Anyway, I had better get on with some lab work and feed my cells,

Will update you all soon,

Gem XOXO