Student Newsletter

Welcome to the Autumn edition of our newsletter! The aim of this newsletter is to keep you informed on upcoming events and opportunities, as well as to share with you the achievements of our students.

If you have any news items you wish to be included in future newsletters, please email them to a member of the comms team!

~~~

News

• Welcome to our new cohort of 2023 starters! We are so excited for you to be a part of the White Rose DTP, and look forward to seeing all that you accomplish.

• Symposium 2023

Registration for our Annual Symposium is now open! Attendance is compulsory for all students, except for those on placements. Any student on their PIPS or in their 5th year on extension is welcome to attend the symposium, however this is not mandatory.

This year the Symposium will take place at the Cloth Hall Court, Leeds on Friday 8th December, 09:00 – 18:00. 

• 4th Year students must submit an abstract using this form (deadline Monday 30th October) for either a research or PIPS talk.
• 3rd year students will need to make a poster based on their research. Poster criteria and submission deadlines will be communicated nearer the time.

To have a look at what the day will be like, check out our archived symposium highlights from previous years!

• DTP Residential 2023

Our 2023 residential will be held from the 6^th to the 9^th of November at YHA Langdale in the Lake District. It will be a great opportunity to get to know people both from other year groups, and from the other universities, in an informal setting, and will include a mix of fun, social time, cohort building, and training sessions. It is recommended for 1st and 2nd year students, and optional for years 3 and 4.

The registration deadline has been extended to the 6th of October. 

Things you may have missed…

There are many things going on behind the scenes that may have flown under the radar!

• DTP Science Book Spotlight blogs

Are you passionate about reading? Look no further! Isobel from our Comms team has started a book review blog series in which you will be treated to regular reviews on popular science books. Her first post discusses ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rachel Skloot, the controversial story behind the cultured HeLa cells and the black US-American woman to whom those cells belong.

If you are interested in writing your own review, or even just have some science book recommendations, then please get in touch with a member of the comms team!

• Where has your PhD taken you?

Back in January, we sent around a questionnaire about where you have travelled to as part of your PhD. In case you missed our Tweet, here are some highlights from the responses we received!

Have you been somewhere that isn’t on these maps! Help us keep them up to date by letting us know!

• A note from your comms team  

Are you interested in science communication and/or are wanting to fill that CV? We’re looking for new members to join the WRDTP comms team! No experience required and time commitment can be flexible. Whether it is writing one-off blog posts (like our book reviews) or becoming a permanent member of the team, it would be great to welcome some new faces and perspectives onto the team! If you are interested or would like more information, please contact a member of the team.

Student Achievements

This is where we usually mention students who have given talks, won awards and published papers. However, due to technical issues based around Twitter/X, we’ve been unable to keep up with all of your amazing achievements this time! If you (or someone you know) have any achievements you think we should know about, then please get in touch!

BBSRC WRDTP Newsletter Autumn 2022

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first 2023 edition of the WRDTP Newsletter, a regular email which will go out at the start of each semester! The aim of this newsletter is to keep you informed on upcoming events and opportunities, as well as to share with you the achievements of our students.

If you have any news items you wish to be included in future newsletters, please email them to a member of the Comms Team!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

News

DTP Symposium, Dec 12th 2022

A huge thank you to everyone who took part in our December symposium! Whether you helped to organise the event, gave a talk about your research or PIPS placement, brought along a poster or even just attended, you helped to make the event a roaring success.

Congratulations to those who won prizes on the day! Jess Davis won first place for her research talk, followed by Theo Issitt and Laura Cowell. Our first place poster prize went to Victoria Hill, second to Lydia Barber and third to Aidan Johnson. Joanna Greenman won first place for her flash talk, followed by Jessica Edge and Liam Barratt, and Roz Latham won best PIPS talk.

We also heard from some excellent Keynote speakers: Dr Richard Malham (Head of Research Policy, Integrity and Governance, University of St Andrews) and Dr Rupert Lewis (Chief Science Policy Officer at the Royal Society), and our Q&A panel allowed for interesting discussions about life after finishing a PhD. Thank you to Dr Sarah Harvey (Mewburn Ellis LLP), Dr Claire Stoker (Spirit Medical Communications Group Limited) and Dr Elspeth Ransom (Defra) for forming our panel this year!

Spring Training Day, 29th March 2023, York

The first event of our new training programme is the Spring Training Day, which will be held in York on the 29th of March. The Spring Training Day aims to bring together the whole cohort: with years 1-2 having analytics training and years 3-4 training hopefully focusing on essential skills such as public speaking, publishing, job hunting and interviews/viva. There will also be time for social activities and cohort building! Make sure you have completed this form by the 20th of January. This is a compulsory part of the DTP training schedule so please make every effort to attend!

A note from your comms team  

Are you interested in science communication and/or are wanting to fill that CV? We’re looking for new members to join the WRDTP Comms Team! No experience required and time commitment can be flexible. Whether it is writing one-off blog posts or becoming a permanent member of the team, it would be great to welcome some new faces and perspectives onto the team! If you are interested or would like more information, please contact a member of the Comms Team.

Student Achievements 

Prizes and awards

Congratulations to: Patrick Hunter, who won 3rd place for research and career showcase poster prize; Theo Issit for winning a £9000 Elsie may Sykes award for a pilot study in cancer patients at York hospital, being a 3-minute thesis national finalist and Falling walls Delft winner; and Gemma Banister for a successful grant application for a 3-month placement under the UK-Canada Globalink Doctoral Exchange Scheme with UKRI.

Publications

Below is a list of recent publications from some of our students: 

• Patrick Hunter: Single-molecule and super-resolved imaging deciphers membrane behaviour of onco-immunogenic CCR5 (Hunter et al., 2022)
• Lydia Barber: Selectivity and stability of N-terminal targeting protein modification chemistries (Barber et al., 2023) 
• Emily Magkourilou: Sequence of introduction determines the success of contrasting root symbionts and their host (Bell, Magkourilou, Field & Irwin, 2023) and Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal-induced tolerance is determined by fungal identity and pathogen density (Bell et al., 2022)

We understand that there are many more achievements worth celebrating that are not mentioned above, and we apologise to anybody not included! To avoid this in the future, it would be great if you could let us know what you have been up to, either via email or by tagging the WRDTP account (@BBSRCWhiteRose) on twitter.

BBSRC WRDTP Newsletter Autumn 2022

Welcome to the first edition of the WRDTP Newsletter, a regular news update which will be released at the start of each semester! The aim of this newsletter is to keep you informed on upcoming events and opportunities, as well as to share with you the achievements of our students.

If you have any news items you wish to be included in future newsletters, please email them to a member of the Comms team!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

News

Welcome to our new cohort of 2022 starters! We are so excited for you to be a part of the White Rose DTP, and look forward to seeing all that you accomplish.

Masterclasses 2022

DTP masterclasses were a brand new, exciting concept launched in 2021. Our 2022 masterclasses hosted at Leeds, York and Sheffield were a great way for students to delve into the latest developments in an area of research with top academics from each university. 

This year, talks were focussed in the areas of: Navigating the academic environment, genome engineering, super-resolution imaging, analysis of microbial omics data, single-cell RNAseq, and cryo electron microscopy. We hope that most students were able to attend at least one of the masterclasses that was relevant to their research, and that you were also able to get to know your DTP colleagues from across all years and universities!

We are looking forward to running our masterclasses again in 2023, and would love some suggestions as to which topic areas you wish to be covered! It would be great to cover the areas that you will find the most interesting and useful in order for everyone to get the most out of these sessions.

DTP Symposium, Dec 12th 2022 

Registration for our annual symposium is now open! Attendance is compulsory for all students, except for those on placements. Unlike the past two years, this year’s event will be held entirely in person! This means that no posters or talks will be accessible virtually and we encourage everyone to attend.

This year, the symposium will take place at The University of York on Monday 12th December, 09:00 – 18:00. 

• 4th Year students must submit an abstract (deadline Monday 31st October)
• 3rd year students will need to make a poster based on their research. Poster criteria and submission deadlines will be communicated nearer the time.

A note from your comms team

Are you interested in science communication and/or are wanting to fill that CV? We’re looking for new members to join the WRDTP comms team! No experience required and time commitment can be flexible. Whether it is writing one-off blog posts or becoming a permanent member of the team, it would be great to welcome some new faces and perspectives onto the team! If you are interested or would like more information, please contact a member of the comms team!

Student Achievements (Easter-Summer 2022)

Prizes 

Congratulations to Ezra Herman, a student in the Friman lab from York who has been awarded the Enrichment Placement Award from the The Alan Turing Institute! 

A huge well done also to Alex Holmes who won the Leeds Partnership Awards 2022! 

Publications

Below is a list of recent publications from some of our students: 

• Kyle Le Huray: Systematic simulation of the interactions of pleckstrin homology domains with membranes (Le Huray et al. 2022), and Characterization of the membrane interactions of phospholipase Cγ reveals key features of the active enzyme (Le Huray et al. 2022)
• Harry Pink: Identification of genetic loci in lettuce mediating quantitative resistance to fungal pathogens (Pink et al. 2022)
• Theo Issitt: Sampling and Analysis of Low-Molecular-Weight Volatile Metabolites in Cellular Headspace and Mouse Breath (Issitt et al. 2022)

Other achievements

See what else our students have been up to!

• University of York students Harry Pink and Ethan Redmond both presented their research at the ICAR conference in Belfast. Read about their experience here!
• Leeds student Alex Holmes hosted a gameshow at Be Curious 2022. See here to read more! 

We understand that there are many more achievements worth celebrating that are not mentioned above, and we apologise to anybody not included! To avoid this in the future, it would be great if you could let us know what you have been up to, either via email or by tagging the WRDTP account (@BBSRCWhiteRose) on twitter.

Our DTP students have produced the second issue of the DTP newsletter. Many thanks to the editorial board and all our student contributors for all their hard work. Please take the time to read this, on the last page there is info about how to get involved and submit your own contributions for future issues.

Read it here:

DTP Newsletter issue 2