Good news from the Department of Life Sciences - February 2018

Professor Craig Banks was quoted in PES Magazine and Manufacturing Global. Print City is part of a consortium urging the UK government to support SMEs to help drive the UK to the forefront of Industry 4.0.

The Department had a successful IBMS re-accreditation event for the BSc (Hons) Healthcare Science (Life Sciences) and Biomedical Science degrees. Congratulations to everyone involved throughout the process. A big thank you to the Programme Team (particularly Dr Nina Dempsey-Hibbert, Dr Lisa Coulthwaite, Dr Sarah Jones and all the unit leaders).

The Department has been selected to host the G L Brown lecture sponsored by the Physiological Society. This year’s speaker is Rachel Tribe from Kings College London. The lecture will be on the 18 April and will be part of a pan-Manchester physiology symposium with speakers from Manchester Met (Dr Llwyd Orton and Dr Adam Lightfoot), University of Manchester and University of Salford.

Dr Jim Pritchett has been awarded £7k by the Wellcome Trust/Children in Need Curiosity Fund to deliver an outreach project in collaboration with Abraham Moss Warriors Sports club run by June Kelly MBE. This was one of 30 projects funded across the UK, from over 100 applications.

Professor Craig Banks joins the Editorial Board of ChemElectroChem. a top-ranking electrochemistry journal for primary research papers and critical secondary information from authors across the world (ISI Impact Factor 2016: 4.136;8/29 (Electrochemistry).

Dr Jonathan Butler is a co-author on a paper just published in Glycobiology with University of Manchester, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and The University of Sydney entitled "Functional analysis of the Helicobacter pullorum N-linked protein glycosylation system”

Kelly Morris, a graduate from the Scientist Training Programme (STP) MSc Clinical Science (Reconstructive Science) course was on the BBC2 programme “Surgeons: At the Edge of Life”.  Kelly graduated in 2016 and now works at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham within the Maxillofacial Centre.  Kelly works with patients who have congenital deformity, head and neck cancer, facial burns and trauma.  The BBC2 programme followed a patient who underwent extensive facial surgery, which required a prosthesis.  The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is one of the largest world leading maxillofacial centres and we have a number of our STP students working at this unit.  We also have a number of colleagues from this unit teaching on our Reconstructive Science programme.

A recent Science Communication MSc graduate, Valeria Calusi, had her dissertation project presented at the 2018 European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals. This work was a collaboration between Manchester Met, Complete Medical Communications and McCann Complete Medical.

PhD student Nicola Edwards (DoS Fiona Wilkinson) who had her abstract selected for oral presentation as part of a Young Investigator session at the 19th Imperial College London Symposium held at the end of 2017 entitled; “Vascular endothelium: Role in disease pathogenesis and as a therapeutic target” which was sponsored by The British Heart Foundation.

Nicola Edwards also won a Vector Labs photomicrograph image competition with her image of the elusive endothelial progenitor cells which circulate in the blood and are considered vascular repair cells, so look out for her canvas which we will put on display.

Dr Mathew Piasecki had a paper accepted in European Journal of Applied Physiology.

Dr Liam Bagley had a paper accepted in Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.