October 2018

A busy teaching month.  Tanya welcomed a new tutorial group, and, together with Freek van Eeden, delivered a new MSc practical course on the use of CRISPR in zebrafish, which was a great success.

Our manuscript on double-anterior ears, hmx3a mutants, mathematical modelling and more is now posted on bioRxiv.  Congratulations to Ryan, Sam, Nick and all the team!

Ana and Anzar gave excellent talks on their projects in the departmental first year PhD symposium.

September 2018

I (Tanya) went travelling in September.  The first stop was to present the lab's work as a poster at the wonderful EMBO 'Size and Shape' meeting in Bangalore, India.  I stayed on for a very enjoyable visit to Raj Ladher's lab and gave a seminar on the lab's morphogenesis work. 

I then went on to give two seminars in Singapore, at the Department of Biological Sciences and Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore, hosted by Tim Saunders.  It was also good to see friends and colleagues at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.

I then flew down to Melbourne to visit Pete Currie at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University, where I gave another talk on our drug screening project, and admired the epaulette sharks and other beautiful creatures in the aquarium there.

The trip was rounded off with a committee meeting for the International Society of Differentiation and the excellent ComBio2018 Conference in Sydney, where I gave a short talk on our morphogenesis work.

Meanwhile, the lab continued to do well back in Sheffield.  Most importantly, Elvira passed her PhD viva with minor corrections - many congratulations!

August 2018

Nick and Tania presented posters on their imaging work at the 10th Anniversary Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy Conference in Dresden.

Alexandra attended the Genetics Society workshop for undergraduate students in Edinburgh, where she presented a talk on her summer project in the Whitfield lab, and enjoyed a view of the Edinburgh festival fireworks.

July 2018

The lab enjoyed a pub lunch and walk out to Wyming Brook at the end of the heatwave.  Goodbye and good luck to Maria, who has successfully completed her Erasmus project in the lab.

Congratulations to Tania Mendonca on her recent wedding and PhD graduation!  Tania joins us from the Frangi group (CISTIB, Faculty of Engineering) for three months to complete her postdoctoral project on computational analysis of our light-sheet and confocal imaging datasets.

Congratulations also to Anzar, who won a poster prize at the annual BMS and MBB PhD retreat at Ilam Hall in the Peak District.  Anzar was also elected as Social Secretary for the BMS PhD Society Committee.

Sarah and Davide presented posters at the Bateson Centre Away Day.

Lab lunch on the scorched lawn of the quad!

June 2018

Sarah and Tanya presented work from the Whitfield lab at the 13th International Zebrafish Conference in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin.

A warm welcome to our undergraduate summer project students: Alexandra Onea (funded by the Genetics Society) and Maria Valdivia Cruz (funded by the Erasmus European exchange programme).

May 2018

Many congratulations to Davide and Silvia on their wedding!

We enjoyed a day of excellent talks from colleagues from Sheffield and Manchester at the inaugural North of England Developmental Biology Symposium.

April 2018

Many congratulations to Sarah Burbridge on the birth of Esme!

We had fun trying out the new Virtual Reality system from Arivis for viewing our light-sheet microscopy data.

Anzar gave an excellent seminar at Heptares Therapeutics, Welwyn Garden City.  Anzar will be joining Heptares for a placement later in his PhD.

Tanya was elected as a Committee Member of the British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) at the BSDB's 70th anniversary meeting in Warwick.  Impressions of the meeting (historical, musical and scientific) by Andreas Prokop can be found here.

Davide gave a flash presentation of his PhD project work at the Krebs Institute Imaging Symposium.