![NIHR training camp Max J and team 2014[1]](https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/surgeryandcancer/files/2014/08/NIHR-training-camp-Max-J-and-team-20141.jpg)
Congratulations to the research team led by Dr Maximilian Johnston from the Department of Surgery, who recently won a prestigious NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) prize for ‘Best Group Health Research Funding Application’ at the NIHR Research Training Camp.
Professor Nagy Habib, from the Division of Surgery at Hammersmith was the Principal Investigator of a study looking at a stroke therapy using stem cells extracted from patients’ bone marrow, which has shown promising results in the first trial of its kind in humans.
Click here to check out the full story on the Imperial news site.
Dr Toby Athersuch from the Division of CSM has been awarded a RSC Research Mobility Fellowship, supporting up to three months collaborative work with Waters Corporation (Manchester) with Dr Mike Morris. The fellowship comes with substantial additional laboratory support from Waters.
A new Imperial College AHSC Bulletin has been launched, to provide an opportunity for staff and stakeholders to catch up on the latest news and events at the Academic Health Science Centre.
The latest edition features an article on Stratified and Systems Medicine, so to see this and everything else that’s going on check out the bulletin.
You are all cordially invited to the CSM Movie Night!
The entry fee is £10, which will provide you with a seat and a complimentary supply of wine and beer, plus a French/Spanish themed selection of snacks!
The CSM movie nights will commence on Thursday, 7th August with a screening of ‘Pans Labyrinth’ (Spanish), and will be hosted in 660 SAF building.
Please see attached CSM Movie Night program line up for the next few months.
All of the proceeds will be donated to EducAid, a non-profit educational charity organisation which operates in the heart of post-war Sierra Leone. Please see link below for further information.
http://www.educaid.org.uk/about-us/
Imperial have now launched a new Parents Network website, which aims to provide a one stop shop for all relevant policies and information related to being a parent at Imperial as well as things like staff perks, items for sale and buddy schemes.
The pages include information to support expectant parents and parents with children of any age to obtain a good work life balance, achieving success at work whilst enjoying being a parent at home.
Able@Imperial is the College’s staff forum open to all disabled staff, staff who support disabled dependents, and staff who have an interest in disability in the workplace. This is the newest staff group established in August 2013.
The next ABLE general meeting will be held on Thursday 11th September at South Kensington:
The Surgery and Cancer contact is Rachael Waddington, so please get in touch for any local help or guidance.
Ovarian Cancer Action is the UK’s leading ovarian cancer charity and we raise money to fund the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre.
Where do we get the money? We don’t – our supporters raise money by jumping out of airplanes, running marathons, cycling around India or selling cakes at summer fetes.
By funding the world-class research that goes on at the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre in partnership with Imperial College London, we are offering women and their loved ones hope for the future.
A cervical smear doesn’t test for ovarian cancer and only 44% of women will survive beyond five years of an ovarian cancer diagnosis. We want women with ovarian cancer to have a better chance of survival and to receive treatment that improves their quality of life.
We raise awareness of the symptoms visiting womens’ groups across the UK, attending conferences and creating easy to understand information that’s printed or on our website www.ovarian.org.uk.
We campaign for all women with non-mucinous ovarian cancer to be genetically tested for the BRCA gene mutation at point of diagnosis.
We are in awe of the pioneering work that the scientists carry out at the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre, and we want everyone to know about it.
Dr Euan Stronach, a senior cancer research fellow at our Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre, said: “It does not take long looking at the wall to remind yourself why we do what we do. I want ovarian cancer to become something people genuinely feel they can beat rather than be beaten by.”
If you would like to get involved with fundraising for Ovarian Cancer Action and backing the scientists’ brilliant work, please email Amelia@ovarian.org.uk or go to www.ovarian.org.uk/fundraising.
Thank you!
The Department of Medicine this month held a panel discussion on combining academic and family life, the first of it’s kind to take place at Imperial. The panel, chaired by Prof Jenny Higham – Vice Dean (Education and Institutional Affairs) along with the Provost Prof James Stirling and five other academics, all shared their experiences of combining academic and family life, followed by an open discussion on the topic.
The Provost highlighted issues relating to identifying and sharing good practice, engaging and developing the post doc community and establishing a competent career advice and coaching scheme.
This panel discussion forms part of the Athena SWAN initiative, which aims to recognise and celebrate good practice on recruiting, retaining, and promoting women in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine) careers and create a level playing field so all staff can flourish in progressing their careers.
Surgery and Cancer submitted their Bronze Athena SWAN application and action plan in April this year and will find out if they were successful later in the year. Currently the action plan is being put into practice, a new Lifestyles webpage will be launched and a Surgery & Cancer Departmental meeting will take place on Wednesday the 1st of October, so watch this space for more details.
Prof Alison McGregor and Dr Daqing Ma travelled to China with Prof Anthony Bull (Centre for Blast Injury Studies) to attend the Chinese Western Anaesthetic Forum on the 21st July, where Prof McGregor and Dr Ma both gave lectures.
They then met with the 3rd Military Hospital in Chongqing for the Perioperative Management Symposium of Traumatic Injury, where discussions took place to explore potential collaborations around trauma injury, particularly blast injury in conjunction with Imperial’s College Blast Centre.
Prof Nicholson this month spoke with Select Science about personalised medicine and how delivering the correct treatment for the right individual, based on their genes and environment, could be the future of healthcare.
He spoke in detail about how the use of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy enables an overview of hundreds of thousands of metabolites in a single analytical run covering a large number of physiological and metabolic processes. For more information watch the video here.
Waters, a leading analytical instrument manufacturer, announced this week that it acquired the technology, called Rapid Evaporative Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (REIMS), from MediMass Ltd, a company created by the iKnife’s inventor, CSM’s Professor Zoltan Takats.
For the past three years, Waters and MediMass have worked in partnership with researchers at Imperial to investigate applications of REIMS in surgery, which could potentially provide surgeons with diagnostic information about the tissue they are cutting in real time. Read more
CSM STRATiGRAD PhD students Fran Jackson and Nancy Georgakopoulou are organising (together with UCC students) a postgraduate symposium for the CSM STRATiGRAD PhD students and students from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic centre (APC) at University College Cork (UCC).
The symposium will be focussing on gut microbiome research using molecular biology and multi-omics technologies . The event will be held at the end of September at Imperial College, which will include lectures from the section leaders, postgraduate current work posters and oral presentations, as well as a social networking aspect. Both centres are interested in the interaction of the gut microbiome and host health, this networking event is to integrate knowledge and training between our centres. By interacting at a postgraduate level, it will promote awareness in students from both parties and open up the opportunity for future, and hopefully, lasting collaborations.
Fran and Nancy have been awarded £1500 towards this event by the Imperial College Graduate School through their Cohort Building Activity Funding Scheme. More details of the event will be posted as soon as they are announced.
The BBC’s Bang Goes the Theory features a story on the intelligent knife.
Professor Darzi and other health experts gathered at the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday 17th June, for the Centre for Health Policy’s ‘eHealth for Better Care Conference’.
New app developed by Dr Stephanie Russ, Honorary Research Fellow in S&C, which helps patients ensure best outcome from surgery.
Friday the 11th of July 2014 saw the first ever Division of Computational and Systems Medicine Football World Cup, which took place in the Secret Garden at South Kensington Campus.
Eight teams from across the globe, made up of PhD students, researchers, admin staff and academics (including the Head of Division), battled it out to be supreme champions of the CSM World Cup. The event was accompanied by an enthusiastic crowd of colleagues and family, and an amazing spread of food and drinks to fuel the troops.
After 11 gruelling matches the Mundo All Stars emerged as victors and revelled in their accomplishment at the elaborate closing ceremony, where they were presented with winners medals and of course the coveted CSM World Cup trophy. The event turned out to be a huge success so let’s hope this will be the first of many CSM World Cup events!
Dr Mike Wilson from the section of Anaesthesia, Pain Medicine and Intensive Care was invited to give a talk on ‘Inflammatory Mechanisms of Ventilator-Induced Lung Injury’ at the British Association of Lung Research annual conference, held at Imperial on the 10 & 11 July 2014.
Congratulations to the following staff from the Division of Surgery who have all received awards:
Sheraz Markar: NIHR Doctorate Research Fellowship
(Non-Invasive Exhaled Breath analysis for the Prediction of Oesophago-Gastric Cancer)
Sophie Doran: Imperial College Charity Research Fellowship
(Use of exhaled breath to diagnose cancer recurrence)
Shobhit Arya: Gerhard Buess Technology award, 10 World Congress of Endoscopic Surgery, EAES, Paris 2015 (Multispectral imaging of tissue oxygenation and perfusion in bipolar radiofrequency induced anastomoses: a study of tissue viability in the acute porcine model)