Bridget Watson, PhD student in the Fineran lab, had the honour of winning the 'best poster' prize at the ZING Regulating with RNAs in Bacteria and Archaea meeting.
Congratulations to technician Michelle Wilson, whose work with the department's Flow Cytometry suite earned her the OSMS Research Support Staff Award at the 2015 awards function, held last night.
The Department of Microbiology and Immunology has won two major grants from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), as part of an ongoing research commitment to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from pastoral livestock farming.
A big congratulations to the Microbiology and Immunology students who were among the several hundred from the University of Otago to graduate this December.
Congratulations to the 2015 Microbiology and Immunology students who received the top marks in their course. Prizes are awarded for the highest grade total from the current cohort of BSc and BSc(Hons) students, and the highest marks in each of the 200-level papers offered.
Professor Gerald Tannock and his interdisciplinary research team have been awarded $1M of funding to develop a slow-release energy weaning food for babies, to stop them from waking up hungry.
Dr Xochitl Morgan has joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology as a Lecturer, bringing expertise in sequencing and computational biology and an impressive publication profile. She is particularly interested in areas of environmental and medical microbiology, with one of her major research projects looking at host-microbe interactions in inflammatory bowel disease.
Congratulations to Dr Raymond Staals, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fineran Lab, who has been awarded a Fast-Start Grant of $300,000 in the 2015 Marsden Funding round. Raymond's project is entitled Restriction of gene transfer in pathogenic bacteria by a novel CRISPR-Cas system.
Dr Matloob Husain is conducting a survey of University of Otago staff to learn more about the reasons why staff did or didn't take up the offer of a free influenza vaccine last winter.
Congratulations to the six staff of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology who have been successful in obtaining University of Otago Research Grants for the 2015-2016 year.
