We had a farewell lunch to celebrate Nasri and Mike completing and obtaining their BSc(Hons) and PGDipSci degrees respectively. Well done on your achievements!
Mike will be coming back next year to continue as a Master’s student, and Nasri is contemplating returning to the Group for a Master’s degree as well. We also had a special guest Victoria de Guzman, who is a BSc(Hons) student with A/Prof Brent Copp. She will be work shadowing Dona in the lab during the summer whilst writing up her BSc(Hons) dissertation.
Congratulations to Mike and Nasri. Mike submitted his PGDipSci Thesis on the application of NMR to measure binding constants, and Nasri submitted his BSc(Hons) Thesis on the production, purification and characterisation of Hsp90. Well done guys.
Thomas will be returning to Germany this Friday. He had a productive time here at Auckland, and a manuscript about his work is currently under preparation. We hope you have enjoyed your time here in New Zealand, and let’s keep in touch.
Nasri delivered his BSc(Hons) presentation this morning on his work on Heat Shock Protein 90 (HSP90). We would like to congratulate Nasri for his effort and wish him good luck for his BSc(Hons) dissertation that is due in November.
We welcome Thomas Hanauer who is joining us as a Visiting Student for eight weeks. Thomas is from the research group of Dr Tobias Gruber at the Technische Universitat Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony, Germany. Thomas will be investigating the interactions between synthetic macrocycles and small organic molecules that contain the methylammonium motif by using NMR spectroscopy.
Thomas Hanauer
Dr Tobias Gruber Research Group at TU Bergakademie Freiberg
Ivan gave a Talk on “NMR studies of an enzyme involved carnitine biosynthesis” at the 6th Asia-Pacific NMR Symposium (APNMR), which was held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
We welcome Dona Gunawardana and Danilo Correddu to our Group.
Dona is originally from Sri Lanka. She has been living in New Zealand for 8 years and she is joining us as a BSc(Hons) student. Her project will involve structural and biochemical studies of a plant enzyme that is involved in ethylene biosynthesis.
Danilo is a native of Italy. He received his degree in Biotechnology from the Università degli studi di Sassari in 2010, and a Master’s degree in Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology from the same institute in 2012. He has also work experience at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the University of Turku in Finland, and at a spin-off company from the Universidad de Barcelona in Spain. Danilo is joining us as a PhD student. He will work on structural and biochemical characterisations of human proteins that are associated with Parkinson’s disease.
We are delighted to have been awarded a Small Project Grant by the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand for our project on investigating the cause of Parkinson’s disease at a molecular level. We would like to thank the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Neurological Foundation for their decision. Now, the hard work begins!
The press release from the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand can be found here.
