Division of Biosciences Staff Meeting Wednesday 5 th December 2018 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Division of Biosciences Staff Meeting

Wednesday 5th December 2018 3.30 - 5.00pm AV Hill Lecture Theatre

“State of the Division” update

Frances Brodsky, Director

Biosciences is 10+ years old

• Division established 2007-John Carroll
• Interim Director 2012-2013-Neil Millar
• Director 2014-present-Frances Brodsky

Successes to celebrate

• Maintained our excellent research reputation &

continue to attract outstanding students

• Renewed LIDo and 2X WT DTPs
• Established new advanced imaging centre
• Sorted out fellowship positions in the Division
• Earned and retained Athena SWAN bronze

award

• Held 20 Divisional research lectures

Credits & thanks for the successes

• Stephen Price for his role as Assoc Director for Education
• Heads of the DTPs: David Attwell, Gabriel Waksman,

Geraint Thomas, Jonathan Ashmore, Finn Werner

• Imaging centre-Chris Thrassivoulou & many others
• Athena SWAN-Snezana Djordjevic, David Attwell, Jason

Rihel & other members of SAT

• Others stepping up: Animals, mentoring, postdoc welfare,

IT issues

• HoRDs
• Geraint Rees
• Steve Wilson as VDR
• Professional staff

Goals for the next term

• More face time
• Professional services (TOPS)

Positions available

• Associate Director for Research
• Divisional Strategic Research

Manager

• CDB HoRD-in progress
• SMB HoRD-in progress

Upcoming projects

• Budget planning
• REF planning
• TEF participation
• DTP support and renewal
• Athena SWAN goals
• Equality and Diversity
• Respect in the workplace
• Unconscious bias training

Stephen Price

Associate Director (Education) CDB

• Tier 4 Engagement Monitoring
• Subject-Level TEF pilot and TEF2020
• Internal Quality Review 2019
• Biosciences Horizons journal

Trevor G Smart Dept Neuroscience Physiology & Pharmacology

Annette Dolphin

• Awarded J Magnes Lectureship (26th)
• Delivered to Hebrew University (Feb 2019)

(Israeli Society Physiology & Pharmacology)

Awards, Prizes & Honours

Funding

Isaac Bianco

Education in Neuroscience - Interdisciplinary training hub – European Consortium ‘ZENITH’ training 15 graduates in interdisciplinary Systems Neuroscience projects investigating Sensorimotor Processing. EC Horizon 2020 £727,614

Francesca Cacucci

Pre-configured and learned properties of hippocampal circuits Elucidate how neural circuits required for complex behaviours are assembled during development. Wellcome Trust Investigator Award £1,097,310

Francesca Cacucci

Learning to remember: development of neural mechanisms supporting memory formation and storage ERC Consolidator Grant ~£1,599,616

Tara Keck

Inhibitory mechanisms of homeostatic plasticity in vivo Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship £1,566,641

Angus Silver

Sharing standardised experimental data and models of neural systems through the Open Source Brain Repository Wellcome Trust Biomedical Resources £1,037,773

Marco Beato

Spinal motoneurons as active players in motor control BBSRC project grant £511,966

Lorenzo Fabrizi

The developing human pain connectome and brain dynamics of infant pain: sex differences, pain history and skin-to-skin care MRC Project Grant £968,734

Invitations

Lorenzo Fabrizi Organiser, chair and speaker at FENS 2018 Berlin Visit to Kazan Federal University Annette Dolphin Elected Member of Academia Europea (excellence in the humanities, law, sciences, mathematics, medicine, anywhere in the world for the benefit and education of the public of all ages. Aim promote research, advise governments and international organisations in scientific matters). Lecture in Birzeit University (Palestinian Territories)

Lucia Sivilotti Delivered Plenary Ruzzier lecture at Italian Physiological Society, Florence. Member Grant Panel of the Austrian Science Fund Reviewing Editor for Science Fellow of the Physiological Society David Attwell Delivered Plenary Hong Kong, VasCog 2018. Capillary pericytes in health and disease Grant Panel for Alzhemier’s Society Advisor MRC meeting on glioma Alasdair Gibb Invited Lecturer/demonstrator, Patch-clamp workshop, Tarbiat Modares University Tehran Invited Speaker, 1st “Beritashvili Talks”, Physiology Congress, Tbilisi, Georgia. Invited Speaker, 6th Annual iGluR Retreat, Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Melon Universities. Lecturer/Demonstrator - Cell Physiology Workshop, Marine Biology Laboratory, Plymouth.

Brief Presentation of the UCL Genetics Institute (UGI) Francois Balloux

Director UGI GEE

Remit / Strategy

Core Team

• Aida Andres
• Agata Blaszczyk (Admin 50%)
• Francois Balloux
• David Curtis
• Garrett Hellenthal
• Karoline Kuchenbaecker (50%)
• Richard Mott
• Vincent Plagnol (15%; leaving)
• Maria Sécrier
• Mark Thomas

Friends of UGI

• Jürg Bähler
• Chris Barnes
• Julie Bertrand
• Valentina Cipriani
• Aroon Hingorani
• Nick Luscombe
• Doug Speed
• Nick Wood

UGI in 2018

• 86 Publications and 18 preprints in 2018 authored by the UGI

Core Team (2 Cell; 3 Science ; 5 Nat Genet; 5 Nat Comms …)

• >£5 Million of active Research Funds held by the Core Team
• Sofia Morfopoulou joined UGI on a WT fellowship
• Introduction of UGI weekly seminars (all welcome)
• 2 symposia (epigenetics and ’beyond next-generation

sequencing’)

• Two Doctoral Lectures (again, all welcome)

UGI 2018 trivia, facts and factoids

• All three UGI PhD students finishing in 2018 moved on to

postdocs (Pasteur, Oxford and NHM)

• The sole postdoc leaving UGI in 2018 (Rhys Farrer) secured a

lectureship in Aberdeen

• Long-read sequencing symposium entirely organised by

postdocs (Lucy van Dorp and Rhys Farrer) and largely funded by PacBio and Oxford Nanopore

• Set-up of the UGI terrarium with Golden

Mantellas with the support of the London Zoo

Professor Les Dale Deputy Head CDB/Head of Teaching Cell and Developmental Biology

Funding achievements since the summer

Arantza Barrios – Leverhulme £192k Patricia Salinas – MRC ~£840k/4 years. Roberto Mayor – MRC £490k Michael Duchen – Michael J Fox £249k and £197 for core equipment. Sandrine Geranton – Arthritis £350k Alice Giustacchini- Leuka £125k Caswell Barry – Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship £1.5m Vilaiwan Fernandes – Wellcome-Beit Prize £25k

Laura Porro and Ryan Felice both arrive as new lecturers to strengthen the “Anatomy” effort. Greg Campbell retired September 2018. John Parnavelas will retire in February 2019. Alice Giustacchini will be moving to take up an appointment at ICH. Adam Shellard in the Mayor lab won the “Sammy Lee” Young Embryologists award 2018.

Staff News:

Tilly Mommersteeg at Oxford with Yoshiyuki Yamamoto publish cavefish heart regeneration paper in Cell Reports. Mayor group publishes major studies in Science, Nature Communications and Developmental Cell. Tada group publishes Nature Communications paper on src and cell extrusion in zebrafish. Rihel group publishes sleep paper in Cell Reports. Wilson group publish PNAS paper on left-right asymmetry of parapineal cells. Hunt group have paper in Science Translational Medicine on chronic pain.

Selected publications:

UCL CEF bid 1st round July 2018.

• 1. New Zeiss Fast AiryScan Multi-photon system with 6 channel spectral imaging.
• 2. Zeiss Elyra SIM, PALM, Storm Super Resolution Microscope.

Both to be housed in the new Zeiss Advanced Imaging Centre Anatomy B14 - with Zeiss Lightsheet microscope. UCL and Zeiss have now have a Memorandum of Understating to proceed with the development of Correlative Light and Electron Microscopy facilities at UCL across the multiple Imaging hubs within Biosciences.

• 3. New Raman Spectral Confocal Microscope, to be housed on 5th floor Rockefeller Centre

for Cell & Molecular Dynamics (BBSCRC 17 Alert funding)

• 4. Upgrade of Division of Biosciences High Performance Computing Platform, Research

Data Storage and IT Infrastructure (BBSCRC 17 Alert funding)

Confocal Imaging Facility – Chris Thrasivoulou

Finn Werner

Professor of Molecular Biophysics Deputy Head of Research Department Structural and Molecular Biology (SMB)

Division of Bioscience Staff Meeting December 2018

Dr Kristine Arnvig £685k MRC project grant ‘Conditional Termination of Transcription in Mycobacterium tuberculosis’ £99k The Academy of Medical Sciences Newton International Fellowship [Terry Kipkorir, Capetown] Prof Frances Brodsky £575k MRC project grant ‘Regulation Of Human Glucose Homeostasis By The Novel CHC22 clathrin isoform’ Dr Alan Cheung £545k Wellcome/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship renewal, congratulations with his tenured appointment!

Research grant income

Alan Lowe £491k BBSRC grant ‘Reverse engineering cell competition using automated microscopy and recurrent neural networks’ Saul Purton £1.4m BBSRC Network in Biotechnology and Bioenergy (NIBB) ‘Algae UK’ £578k BBSRC project grant ‘(Re)design of the chloroplast genome - towards a synthetic organelle’ £200k BBSRC project grant ‘Algal vaccines for Aquaculture’ (co-I) Konstantinos Thalassinos £177k CHDI Foundation grant ‘Mechanism of the DNA damage response in Huntington’s disease pathogenesis’ (co-I)

Research grant income

Hard hitting articles

• n membrane shape and endocytosis

Dr Emmanuel Boucrot Dr Giulia Zanetti

Markers of esteem

L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award

• Dr Lanya Al-Haj, Assistant Professor in

Molecular Biology at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman (former PhD student in Saul Purton's team)  Prof Andrew Martin’s abYsis software was chosen as an BBSRC Impact case  Prof Andrea Townsend-Nicholson (as co-I) €8m award of CompBioMed2: A Centre of Excellence in Biomedicine

London 2034 strategy

• UCL committed to becoming a global leader in knowledge exchange,

enterprise and innovation with societal impact. Relationship with London is central to this commitment.

• Engagement – GLA, UCLPartners, NHS, business & industry, local

government, schools, cultural & heritage, non-profit organisations, HEIs

• Some relevant themes to Biosciences:

1. Social justice & the challenge of equality for all – relationship between health and social inequality 2. Health & Wellbeing – pollution, obesity, vaccinations 3. Urban Environment & Green Space 4. Education & Skills 5. Art & Culture

For more information contact Jo at j.santini@ucl.ac.uk

• We’re now a Domain

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research/domains/food-metabolism- society/microbiology-ucl

• Domain Manager post advertised
• Events:
• 16 January - Drinks Reception with 5-minute talks –16:30-19:00
• 5 April Annual Symposium
• June (date TBC) – focussed meeting on Water & Microbes

(Grand Challenges Funded)

Twitter: @microbiologyucl #microbiologyucl

For more information contact Jo at j.santini@ucl.ac.uk

Jeremy Bede-Cox

Divisional Manager Biosciences

• Communications – dispelling the myths

The Divisional Communications Officer welcomes various articles/news items. Here are some examples of what we are looking for:  Research news that does not meet the threshold for UCL News  Individual, research achievements e.g. grants, awards  Events promotion  Academics/researchers’ appearances in media  New staff appointments or promotions  Any other current news related directly to the Division/Research Departments’ activities The Faculty will forward on SLMS/Faculty level news so that the Divisional Communications Officer is aware/can follow up. The Division should share high-level news stories with the Faculty as appropriate. The Divisional Communications Officer will alert the UCL Media Relations team (Bex Caygill) as soon as a newsworthy paper is accepted into a journal. She will offer support and publish the article at central UCL

• level. A lay summary and appropriate images should be supplied.

• Professional Services Manager

 Staffing Team Manager  Finance Manager  Operation Manager  Strategic Research Manager  Imaging Technician post  Other PS posts

• Update

 GDPR training – 100% compliance currently around 75%  Unconscious bias training  Data Storage – James will update

Holiday Party

Anatomy Haldane Hub

• Turn right immediately after leaving AV Hill LT
• Go up one flight of stairs
• Enter the corridor connecting Medical Sciences and Anatomy Buildings
• Go down to Anatomy ground floor
• The Haldane Hub entrance is right next to the JZ Young LT

If you get lost, please enquire about the party location at the Anatomy security desk