12:00noon Monday 13th July
Room 208, 2nd floor,
Microbiology building,
720 Cumberland Street
12:00noon Monday 6th July
Room 208, 2nd floor,
Microbiology building,
720 Cumberland Street
Congratulations Dr Matthew McNeil (Research Fellow) who has received a $1.2 million HRC project grant over 36 months "Combating antimicrobial resistance its high-throughput bacterial genetics".
Congratulations Dr Rachel Darnell and Greg Cook who have received a $1.2 million HRC project grant over 36 months "Unlocking antimicrobial tolerance in bacterial pathogens to overcome AMR".
Sonya Fenton, a BBioMedSci(Hons) student in the Kemp lab has been awarded the Barbara Heslop Memorial Scholarship, valued at $8,500. This scholarship is in memory of the late professor Barabara Heslop who graduated from Otago Medical School in 1948 and had a forty-year career at Otago, specializing in transplantation research.
After getting an overseas laboratory test for Covid-19 working in New Zealand - with Associate Professor James Ussher - Quiñones-Mateu was in the lab for much of lockdown. He, Postdoctoral Fellow Rhodri Harfoot and a small team grew the virus from patient samples, turning a healthy carpet of cells in a flask discoloured and patchy. They isolated and sequenced the RNA - genetic code - and became the only lab in the country to have the virus.
An Assistant Research Fellow at the University of Otago’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Tom (23) has won this year’s Gordon Watson Scholarship. The award is worth $24,000 and will allow him to spend two years at Columbia, beginning this September, to complete a Masters of Public Health.
A collaboration between Otago and ESR has received a substantial government grant to lead an international team of scientists to sequence the genomes of all of New Zealand’s positive COVID-19 cases and track how the virus spread across New Zealand. Dr Jemma Geoghegan has been allocated $600,000 from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) COVID-19 Innovation Acceleration Fund.
Another reason for the phantastic Lucía Malone (Fineran Lab) to be smiling. Her PhD thesis has been put on the Health Sciences Divisional List of Exceptional Theses. Lucía Malone, a PhD candidate in the Fineran Lab, recently handed in her PhD thesis titled, "Phage interactions with CRISPR-Cas systems in Serratia sp. ATCC 39006. Congratulations Lucía! We are very proud.
Associate Professor Jo Kirman co-wrote Otago's most read article in the last year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it will donate A$10 million to help fund an Australian trial testing whether a very old vaccine, BCG, can be used against a new threat, COVID-19. So what is the BCG vaccine and what might its place be in the fight against coronavirus?
