A long overdue congratulations to Avee Naidoo(MSc candidate) for receiving the Frederick Banting and Charles Best Master’s Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
The award funds Avee’s research examining age-associated inflammation, impaired macrophage function and disease susceptibility in the elderly.
Way to go Avee!
Jessica Wallace (Sept 2013-Apr 2014) was a Life Sciences student who took Dawn’s HTHSCI 4II3 (Advanced Immunology) class. She was such an engaged student that despite being full to the rafters, she became the Bowdish lab’s 7th undergraduate student in the 2013/14 school year. She worked with Dr. Chris Verschoor to study the role of circulating bacterial products in age-associated inflammation. She has been accepted to McMaster’s Medical Sciences Graduate Program and will be working with Dr. Deborah Sloboda (Biochemistry) as an MSc student in Sept 2014. Congratulations Jessica!
Bowdish-McCarry PhD candidate, Fan Fei, publishes a protocol she created to study the endometabolome of macrophages and microbes in Analytical & Bioanalytical Chemistry. Click the image for the .pdf.
Bowdish lab receives funding from the province of Ontario to train two new graduate students! Avee Naidoo (MSc) and Dessi Loukov, who will be starting a PhD in Sept 2013, will be studying how age-associated inflammation predisposes older adults to pneumonia.
For full details on the award for Dawn’s proposal “Interplay between inflammation and impaired anti-bacterial immunity in the elderly.”
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/IIDR-news/ERAs-2014.html#.UzXGj_ldWSo
Dessi Loukov, pictured here pushing back the boundaries of science.
Aveshni Naidoo, MSc sits beside the coolest jack-o’-lantern ever.
Dawn posts on all things macrophage-y and gives updates on the Bowdish lab and science life in general on her Google+ page, which has now been listed by http://onlinephdprogram.org as one of their “99 Google Plus Pages every PhD Candidate should follow.” Thanks for following everyone!
Today Mike Dorrington officially became a PhD candidate as he passed his comprehensive exam with distinction. He wrote a very interesting proposal on developing new technologies to measure serotype replacement of non-vaccine strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae in the developping world, which stemmed from his interest in global health. Well done Mike!
The winning team!
Well it was an impressive show even for our over achieving lab! Bowdish lab undergraduates (Netusha Thevaranjan, Dessi Loukov, James Han), graduate students (Kyle Novakowski, Mike Dorrington, Fan Fei), post-docs (Dr. Chris Verschoor) and associates (Fiona Whelan, Dr. Jennifer Stearns, Michelle Pinto) all got selected to present posters at the IIDR trainee day. James Han won the IIDR Award of Excellence for best poster by an undergraduate and Dr. Jennifer Stearns brought home the award for best poster by a post-doc. Avee Naidoo was selected to give a talk only 6 weeks into her graduate degree and Dr. Chris Verschoor won the Gulliver award ($1000!) for the best oral presentation by a post-doc. What a great day!
For a complete album of photos, click here.
Avee Naidoo gives her first talk on her project – 6 weeks into grad school!
Dessi Loukov presents her poster and gets lots of compliments on her story.
Dr. Chris Verschoor wins the Gulliver award for best presentation by a PDF.
Dr. Jennifer Stearns and James Han win IIDR awards of excellence for their poster presentations.
Fan Fei (PhD candidate), under the supervision of Dr. Brian McCarry, and in conjunction with Bowdish lab undergraduate Keith Lee, studies age related changes in the inflammatory response from a metabolomics perspective. Funded by the Russell Bell Travel Scholarship award, she attended the 9th Annual conference of the Metabolomics Society. July 1-4, 2013, SECC Glasgow. She won the “Glasgow Polyomics & University of Strathclyde Young Scientist Award” for outstanding poster presentation of research in the field of metabolomics at the Metabolomic Conference 2013 in Glasgow Scotland for her work “Comprehensive Metabolomic Analysis Reveals Major Differences in the Macrophage Inflammatory Response Between Young and Aged Mice”. Way to go Fan!
What is the best way to reduce infectious disease in the elderly? Vaccination! Unfortunately the aging immune system presents a number of challenges for vaccine development. Bowdish lab PhD candidate Mike Dorrington discusses them in this review and presents a case for developing novel vaccines that work within the constraints of the aging immune system.
Media coverage: This paper was picked up by MDLinx. See their coverage here.
Click image for .pdf.
Congratulations to both Alicja Puchta and Mike Dorrington for winning at the 2013 FHS research Plenary! Mike was the recipient of the Best Poster Presented by a Doctoral Candidate award. Alicja was the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award, which recognizes graduate students in their final year of a Master’s or Doctoral program who have made outstanding achievements, based on the opinion of their graduate program. This award can be given to a maximum of 10-15% of all students in the final year of a Master’s or Doctoral program affiliated with the Faculty of Health Sciences.
Congratulations and keep up the awesome work!