Dawn received the ASPIRE-Pfizer New Investigator Award for her work on understanding why the elderly are so susceptible to pneumonia. For more details see here.
Sumit Saha, Dawn Bowdish, Fiona Smaill, Gerry Wright
Dr. Chris Verschoor has won the Micheal G. DeGroote Postdoctoral fellowship for 2011-2012. The prestigious Michael G. DeGroote Fellowship Awards provide postdoctoral candidates in the Faculty of Health Sciences the opportunity to pursue leading-edge health sciences research.The awards are designed for candidates who have an exemplary academic record and are interested in pursuing postdoctoral work in one of the numerous areas of research excellence in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University.
Dr. Verschoor won the award for his innovative project proposal on discovering the fundamental basis of susceptibility to pneumonia in the elderly. Pneumonia is a leading cause of death and decline of function in the elderly and a significant cost to the Canadian Health Care System. Dr. Verschoor proposes to discover the underlying molecular mechanisms of their increased susceptibility with a long term goal of discovering innovative therapies.
Sarah Chauvin won a prestigious NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award (USRA) to work in the Bowdish lab this summer. Fiona Whelan (MSc candidate) won “best poster” at a CREST meeting (Current research in Engineering, Science & Technology) hosted by the WISE initiative and Alicja Puchta (PhD candidate) won a travel scholarship to attend a recent Keystone meeting (Immunity in the Respiratory Tract: Challenges of the Lung Environment). Way to go Team!
All summer student and thesis student positions for the upcoming year have been filled. Also please note that we do not accept volunteers for the summer semester.
Dawn, a University of Guelph graduate, will be returning to her alma mater to give a talk on “Mechanisms of Immune Control of Streptococcus pneumoniae in the Upper Respiratory Tract” on Jan. 14 at 11 a.m. in OVC Pathobiology, Room 1810. For a short synopsis of our work see link to article here.
The Bowdish lab has two positions for six week course students (e.g. Biochem 3A03/Health Science 3H03 or other disciplines). These positions are designed for students who are considering a 4th year thesis project but want to have the advantage of full time immersion in the lab during the summer. We have two projects available, one on the role of monocytes/macrophages in host defence against Streptococcus pneumoniae and the other on the discovery of novel signalling motifs in the macrophage scavenger receptors. Students will be required to write a 1 page outline of their research goals at the beginning of their project, to meet daily with their bench supervisor and bi-weekly with Dr. Bowdish and to write a 4-5 page report on their research project in a journal format and will be graded on these written reports in addition to their progress at the bench. Students are strongly encouraged to have WHMIS, Fire Safety and BSL2 safety training prior to commencing their project. If you are interested, please see our FAQ page for requirements and if you are qualified, please contact Dr. Bowdish directly.
The Bowdish lab attended the University of Western Ontario’s Infection & Immunity Research Forum. Alicja Puchta had her abstract chosen for an oral presentation, which was very well received. Fiona Whelan, Zhongyuan Tu and Sarah Chauvin presented a poster that one the Biorad award for the best graduate poster for students in their degree program less than 6 months and Mike Dorrington and Alex Jiang won the e-bioscience award, again for the best poster for students in their degree program for less than 6 months. Fabulous start to grad school, team!
McMaster’s Institute for Infectious Disease Research hosted it’s annual Trainee Day to highlight the brilliant work of our trainees. The Bowdish lab attended and presented three posters.
Alex explaining his poster…
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/images/IIDR%20Trainee%20Day%202010/target37.html
Dawn learning what her students are up to…
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/images/IIDR%20Trainee%20Day%202010/target40.html
Alicja & Mike’s posters….
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/images/IIDR%20Trainee%20Day%202010/target31.html
For more photos, see here..
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/images/IIDR%20Trainee%20Day%202010/index.html
Dawn will be presenting a talk entitled “Immunosenescent macrophages cannot control Streptococcus pneumoniae colonization” 9:45 am Oct 7th and poster entitled the same at 11-12 Oct 8th. For the rest of the program click here.
The Bowdish lab is undergoing massive expansion at the moment & we’re thrilled to welcome our new post-doc, Chris Verschoor. Chris recently graduated with a PhD from Guelph and since Guelph trains the best students, we were happy to scoop him up. (Full disclosure: Dawn graduated from Guelph).
Fiona is a MSc student with a computer science degree from Waterloo, who will be bringing her bioinformatic skills to the wet lab.
Mike is also a MSc student who has recently graduated from beautiful UBC (Full disclosure: Dawn did her PhD there & dreams of going back), spent a month in Ecuador & is now hard at work.
In other graduate student news, Zhongyuan Tu, the first member of the Bowdish lab and former thesis student is now a MSc student. We’re delighted that he’s chosen to stay on.
Tanja Thurn brings years of experience as a medical technologist to the Bowdish lab & she will be tackling some of our technology issues and will be a resource to all.
Welcome to all the new members of our team!