Author: flj112

Fran’s France Fun

So this week we have all been recovering from a hectic week of: firstly, preparing for the funder’s meeting and then actually going to France for the meeting! We have a number of different funder’s who fund the Stratigrad programme and usually all of them come to Imperial College for the bi-annual meetings. However this time, the meeting was held at Servier Laboratories in Orleans, France.

We prepared our slides in a ‘PechaKucha‘ style presentation and had a few practices before we headed off – if you haven’t heard of this type of presenting yet, definitely look it up…It takes a lot of practice, trust me!

Student Representative!

We all can’t believe that it has been nearly a year since we started on the Stratigrad programme. Typically, time is going very quickly and it is already almost time to say hello to the next lot of students starting at Imperial College! This year, I have signed up to be the Postgraduate Student Representative for our section, Computational and Systems Medicine. This involves an induction for the new MRes students in our section, participating in post-graduate education committee (PGEC) meetings (which include free biscuits I’m told) and generally being available to listen to the students in our section.

The most important, however, is that I have the tough task of organising the section’s Christmas Party…Eek!

Biosamples and Babies

Warning: Not for the faint-hearted

In our group we are mainly working with different human and animal biosamples including blood and urine. What you might not know is that for the lucky(?!) few we have stool samples to work on too! Now I know what you are thinking, you’re a little disgusted…I was thinking the same at first but I’m actually really lucky as my project revolves around babies and baby stool just seems less gross…right?

I studied microbiology for my undergraduate degree and have been interested in gut microbiota ever since. I think it’s a fascinating subject which I used to try to talk to my non-scientific friends about but they always looked massively awkward…Thankfully I have many scientists to talk to at IC and medic student housemates who don’t even blink an eye!

Busy, busy, busy!

Last week was one of the busiest weeks since starting our PhDs so I’m afraid my blog is a little late this week! I will explain this a little more below though…

As my first blog I should really talk a little about my PhD project. The main focus of my project is to look at the metabolic profile of preterm infants and identify any prognostic markers that are associated with developing infants. I have a background in microbiology so I will be incorporating this into my project by investigating the host-microbial interactions also. I am very excited about my project (obviously) and hope that my previous knowledge/experience will come in handy.