Bradford ChemBio What’s been going on in our school for the past three months… September-November 2018 Have an item for the newseletter? Email [email protected] or [email protected] with ‘Newsletter’ in the heading Welcome! Welcome from your Newsletter Editors… Welcome to the new edition of our School newsletter! As we approach the end of term, we hope that all of our new students are now settled into their courses, and are year 2+ students are continuing to achieve the education that they want. We haven’t heard much from students for this edition, so this is a reminder that we’re always happy to receive good news stories from students – if you’ve taken part in a charity event, or undertaken some work experience, or even won a sporting society competition, let us know and we’ll make sure you get the recognition you deserve! As you can see from the research pages, this has been an excellent three months in terms of publications, grant awards and networking. We also have reports from two of our roving lecturers, Dr Gisela Helfer and Dr Rianne Lord, on their highly successful research secondments to global institutions. We wish you all a very happy holiday period, and good luck with the exams in January! Dr Kirsten Riches-Suman and Dr Andrew Tedder Athena SWAN Charter Athena SWAN seminar: On the 7th of November the EDOC hosted the first Athena SWAN seminar. Prof Jane Grasby from the University of Sheffield gave a fantastic research talk about her research on the interface of Chemistry and Biosciences, which was very well attended. Jane also included some insights into her career in Chemistry, which I am sure was very interesting especially for our students and early career researchers. Following the seminar, we held a workshop discussing career progression in STEM. In the workshop, we were joined by staff members from different Faculties within the University and we had a long and engaging dialogue around strategies to overcome barriers to progression of minority groups, particularly women. Jane shared some good practise from her University. The next Athena SWAN sponsored seminar will take place on the 3rd of April 2019 and we will welcome Prof Lynda Williams from the University of Aberdeen as our speaker. Career progression focus group: Based on comments from the staff survey last year, we have set up a Career progression focus group. The group is chaired by Prof Steve Rimmer and includes staff from different stages of their career. We are aiming to implement a transparent and proactive system to assist our academic staff in their career progression. In this respect, we will launch an annual CV review system where experienced senior members of staff who served on promotion panels will review CVs and identify individuals who are (nearly) ready to progress to the next stage of their career. Additionally, we are aiming to implement a voluntary mentoring scheme to pair up staff with senior members who can provide expert advice on promotion. Staff and Postgraduate Student Surveys: Thanks to all our staff for filling out the Athena SWAN staff survey in October. Our response rate was 75% at the end, which is very good. The EDOC has now started to analyse the data from the survey and we will feedback the results to you in the next newsletter. We now have also launched the Postgraduate Survey which is currently live. We hope for a good response rate from our Postgraduate students and hope that you will take the time to answer the short survey. It should not take you longer than 10 min to complete and will help us to identify issues around your experiences as Postgraduate students in our School. The EDOC wishes all our staff and students a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Dr Gisela Helfer, Chair of Equality, Diversity and Opportunities Committee 1 2018;Vol2(4) People New starters and new Lecturers… arrivals… I’m Amber Leckenby, and I joined the University of Bradford at the start of October as a lecturer in biomedical science. Before arriving here, I completed a BSc in Genetics and an MRes in Functional and Dr Mark Sutherland has joined the School as a Lecturer in Comparative Genomics at the University of Liverpool. I Biochemistry, taking over from Dr Jim Boyne. Dr Sutherland then went on to complete a PhD, also at Liverpool, completed his BSc in Microbiology at the University of working on parasite genomics and epi-genomics. My Cape in South Africa. He then went on to do a BSc research follows on from this and uses the range of (Honours) and MSc in Microbiology at the University of genomes that were produced throughout my PhD. Stellenbosch. He then worked for a few years as a Lecturer Currently I am investigating the genome of the enteric in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Fort parasite, Entamoeba histolytica, in order to understand Hare before being offered a fully funded PhD in Germany. how the expansion of gene families in the species led to Dr Sutherland completed his PhD in Medical Biochemistry evolution of virulence in the Entamoeba genus. I am also at the Charitè – Campus Benjamin Franklin in Berlin and investigating how DNA methylation plays a role in worked as a PDRA in the field of protein targeted regulating expression of members in these virulence gene therapeutics (immunotoxins) for 5 years. He moved to the families. Institute of Cancer Therapeutics at the University of Bradford 13 years ago, over which time he has carried out Outside of work I’m in to hiking, running and generally just research on a number of projects within the Institute, as eating all types of food. So if anyone is into genomics well as lecturing on the MSc courses and some and/or hiking or even just eating, give me an email! undergraduate BioMed courses. He has extensive experience in Molecular Biology techniques and elucidating drug mechanism of action, he is keen to chat with new colleagues to explore shared interests while he develops his own research projects. When Dr Sutherland is not at work you are more than likely to see him either out running or cycling. New Arrivals… The ChemBio family is growing! In the last few months, two of our Biomedical Science lecturers have had babies. Dr Jenny Waby welcomed baby Lana in September, and Dr Kirsten Riches-Suman welcomed baby Rohan in November. Both families are doing very well and have popped into the department to introduce their new arrivals. Dr Waby and Dr Riches-Suman will be on maternity leave for the remainder of the 2018-19 academic year and are looking forward to resuming their teaching and research inr 2019-20. 2018;Vol2(4) 2 Research Funding cutting edge research UK-India project University Funding The school has been incredibly successful in securing combats infections funding through the University’s internal funding streams. Dr Nicolas Barry, Dr Steven Picksley, and Dr Steven Shnyder threat with diagnostics have been successful in their application to the University Research Development Fund Research and Innovation A £3 million interdisciplinary research project, involving the Pump Priming Scheme. This £12,387 project will aim at University of Bradford, is to address the growing threat of progressing towards in vivo understanding of the drug-resistant infections in India. The project will develop anticancer properties of a highly promising drug innovative diagnostics to curb antimicrobial resistance candidate. Dr Gisela Helfer secured funding for a project (AMR), one of the biggest threats to global public health. entitled ‘Life in the dark: Circadian rhythms of naked mole- AMR describes the situation when infections agents – rats’. Dr Rianne Lord had her project entitled ‘New including bacteria and parasites such as malaria – phosphate mimicking vanadate complexes: in the become resistant to the medicines used to treat them. inhibition of cancer metabolism and cell survival’ funded, as did Dr Sarah Pike (PI) and Rianne (Co-I) on ‘Synthetic The DOSA programme – Diagnostics for One Health and organic oligomers: An innovative class of bioinspired anti- User Driven Solutions for AMR – brings together nine cancer drugs’. Dr Refaat Hamed also secured £12,000 of leading academic institutions, five from India and four funding in this round. from the UK. Medical researchers, diagnostic innovators, economists and social scientists will create cutting edge, Prof Anne Graham secured £1975 from the Research rapid diagnostic solutions to fight AMR in settings as diverse Development Fund and £1378 from the International as community healthcare, dairy farms and aquaculture. Mobility Fund. AMR is of particular concern in India, where the levels of infectious diseases are high but public knowledge of diseases and appropriate treatments is low. In India, and Centre for Skin across the globe, antibiotic use is regularly carried out without appropriate diagnostics, thereby fuelling the AMR crisis. Rapid diagnostic tools are either unavailable, too Sciences expensive or do not fit people’s needs, which leads to antibiotics being used in a trial and error fashion. The Centre for Skin Sciences has had a lot of success during the last quarter: Professor Stephen Rimmer, Head of the School of Chemistry and Biosciences at the University of Bradford, • Prof Kevin McElwee has been awarded £9,925 from the said: “The programme will allow us to develop our Alopecia UK Foundation 2018 Research Pots grant responsive polymer technology into a new format, adapt scheme. our work to detecting resistant bacteria and engage in • UoB signed a contract with German Pharma company real world field trials. Detecting resistant bacteria in Dr August Wolff for CSS to study the effects of drugs on different environments is probably one of the most epidermal pigmentation.