Congratulations to Dr Ram Bhusal, who flew back from Australia (where he is currently working as a postdoc at Monash University) to attend his graduation ceremony. Ram left our group to Australia a year ago and it is great to see Ram doing very well across the ditch. Keep in touch and hope to catch up with you about science again soon!
Congratulations also to Mark who graduated from his BSc today. Well done and hope you are enjoying your BScH year with us as well!
Congratulations to Danilo Correddu for his new review article in Drug Discovery Today. Danilo reviewed the potential of targeting mRNA translation to treat Parkinson’s disease. Well done Danilo.
Ivan was excited to attend the 25th year celebration for the Marsden Fund, which was held in Rotorua on the 25th of March. It was a great evening and we felt privileged to be able to join the event. We looking forward to do more excellent science under the Marsden Fund scheme.
Ivan attended the 11th HOPE Meeting with Nobel Laureates, which was held in Okinawa, Japan between the 4th and 8th of March. It was a very rewarding meeting and it was great to be able to network with young and promising researchers from Asia Pacific and Africa, as well as to learn from the experience of Nobel Laureates. Ivan thank the Catalyst Fund, which is administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for covering the cost for attending the meeting.
Congratulations to Simran, who submitted her MSc thesis this week, and “pre-farewell” for Danilo, who will go home to complete his thesis and hopefully submit within the next few weeks. Simran did very well during her time here, and managed to obtain some good data to study the conformational change of a plant enzyme. Danilo joined the group four years ago. He was an instrumental member of the group in particular – training new students and managing the laboratory. He also did very well on a difficult project. A few papers from Danilo to come soon so watch this space.
Ivan was invited to join the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery as an Associate Investigator. We look forward to network and collaborate with other MWC members to work on research projects and make exciting scientific discoveries!
We would like to thank Professor David Palmer of Lincoln University for the invite to share our work on infantile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (INCL) at the 2nd Asia Pacific Lysosomal Conference, which was held in Auckland between the 14th and 16th of February. Ivan reported our progress on improving the efficacy of enzyme replacement therapy for treating INCL. This work was conducted by Oi Wei Mak in collaboration with the group of Dr Alexander Wolf at Helmholtz Zentrum München.
Nabangshu and Jinal attended the 44th Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function, which was held in Australia between 10th and 14th of February. They both gave a poster presentation for their work. They also managed to catch up with a former group member Dr Ram Bhusal, who is now working at Monash University.
Jinal with her posterNabangshu with his posterNabangshu with Professor Frances Arnold
