European Antibiotic Awareness Day

Antibiotic resistance is:

- as big a threat to human health as climate change
- going to result in 10 million deaths every year by 2050 if we ignore it
- something that will have an impact on us all.

Did you know that today is European Antibiotic Awareness Day, which is part of World Antibiotic Awareness Week? Find out more by visiting the PU website with links there to a range of resources and background info., including an opinion piece by our microbiology lecturer Mat Upton. Sign up to be an Antibiotic Guardian and help preserve antibiotics for future generations! Find out how you can help by seeking alternatives to antibiotics when you are ill. Follow the links to see how SoGoodStudios are helping to raise awareness through their game jam and play the Superbugs game to see how log you can keep the human race alive!

Meet the real A-team

Students – without exception, who have you ALL interacted with? Lecturer? Technician? Head of School?  The answer that is common to all of you is the admissions team who were responsible for helping you gain a place on one of our programmes in the school of biomedical & healthcare sciences.

As the out-going admissions tutor, I have often been thanked by new students (and their parents) for helping them gain a place on one of our undergraduate courses.  The truth is that I have done very little!  The real heroes are the admissions team who are often behind the scenes, where nobody gets an insight as to just what they do.  Let me introduce them to you………

From left to right; Rachael Decieco (Undergraduate Admissions Team Leader), Emma Rowsell, Ellie Barker, Suffia Conway, Eva Varga and Joel Forde.

This happy group is the undergraduate admissions team that has talked to you in person or on the phone, processed your UCAS applications, helped you with your applications, informed you of course options and entry requirements as well as those helpful people that have calmed you down in confirmation & clearing, so that you can obtain the place you wanted at our university.  In addition, they help organise interviews at open/applicant days and have demonstrated the utmost patience and professionalism when dealing with stupid enquiries from this school’s admissions tutor!!  Finally, some of you from further afield have been processed and recruited by our international team which consists of Lisa Ellis and Sue Mudge (unfortunately, not on the photograph!): these two are experts in virtually every country’s A-level-equivalent qualifications and are integral to the admissions tutor decisions to recruit from the four corners of the globe!!

These are the professionals behind the scenes that are and will remain to be the recruiters of generations of our student cohorts to Nutrition, Exercise & Health, Healthcare Sciences (Life Sciences & Physiological Sciences), Human Biosciences and Biomedical Science.  Without the dedication and professionalism of this team, our school and our faculty (PUPSMD) would not be in the healthy state it is today.

Thank you for all your hard work guys,

Andy Foey (admissions tutor, 2014-2016).

NEH Student Prizes photos

We have just got some photographs for the PUPSMD prizes and awards evening that took place on the Hoe marquee on the 20th of September. Awards were given to the highest achiever in each stage for each programme, and for the final year there was a research award to the student with the highest mark for the project. The prizes for Nutrition, Exercise and Health students were sponsored by Vitabiotics and presented by Andy Evenden. Below we have the winners: from the top, Emily (year 3), Rachael (year 1) and Shelley (year 2). Well done all of you!

New students welcomed at Hoe event

Lecturer (crumpled shirt, wine glass) with two of his new first year tutees, Aradhana and Vivienne, at the annual greeting party up on the Hoe. Here is to a good year ahead!

Nuffield Scheme in the School

Millie Steel is studying at Plymouth's Notre Dame School and is here on a Nuffield Research Placement. This excellent scheme allows A level students to work alongside professionals in science, engineering and maths, and is intended to boost interest in these fields.

Millie (photographed below) is working with Vikram Sharma, who runs our Proteomics facility, looking at the proteomes of both Hela and some stem cells. This also involves her working with cell culture, protein electrophoresis and bioinformatics. She writes, " I think the Nuffield Placement is good because it enables students to practice advanced techniques that are beyond and above the A level syllabus. It also offers insights into the applications of Biomedicine in the world today".

Student in Berlin II

Guten Tag!

These past few weeks at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin have been fantastic, and we have had some great results so far. We have been able to characterize the Mustelid herpesviruses in different badger populations as intended, and have now turned our focus to cytomegaloviruses (CMV) found in Gorillas. 

We have been using PCR to analyze gorilla samples to detect the presence of CMV, followed by next generation sequencing to look at the variants of the virus in different gorilla populations. Bioinformatics software packages can be complicated to get used to, but I think they are valuable tools for anyone interested in post-graduate research; if you get the chance to explore these during your 3^rd year project, I would definitely recommend it. 

Kati 

Above: Gorilla samples positive for CMV 

(You can read Kati's first blog from Berlin posted on June 13th.)

Funding for School research

Professor Neil Avent has just obtained funding of £166,000 to commercialise blood group genotyping using next generation sequencing, which he has been developing over in our Systems Biology facility. The funding is for two years and has been obtained from Biofortuna Plc, Broxbourne, the Wirral. Below is Dr Kelly Sillence working on the sequencer when she was still a PhD student here. Kelly's work in the School will now be funded by this new grant.