Summer addition to the lab

A warm welcome to Jeff Wintersinger to the lab. Jeff has just completed the third year of his BHSc in Bioinformatics, here at UofC. He'll be investigating the extent of in silico miss-assembly in parasite genomes and the effect this has on identifying large gene families. The work is an spin-off from the mBio paper. This …

HPI Bootcamp in the Rockies

Just returned from the first trainee bootcamp under our Host-Parasite Interaction programme. Two days at the University of Calgary's Kananaskis BioGeosciences field station. The focus of the bootcamp was to offer trainees (and indeed faculty) instruction in the important, non-science parts of their research. Kim Barrett, Dean of Graduate Studies at UCSD, kicked us off with …

MEEGID in NOLA

At the end of October, folks from UCVM attended the Molecular Epidemiology & Evolutionary Genomics in Infectious Disease (MEEGID) meeting held at Loyola University in New Orleans. The topics at the meeting covered a whole range of microbiology, virology and parasitology research. The advances in DNA sequencing are being embraced by the first two groups and …

Lab expansion

At the beginning of September, I took delivery of three new, bright-eyed and bushy tailed graduate students. Dave Curran recently completed his MSc here in Calgary. Dave's working on gene family evolution in parasites. Keyu Li is new to Canada, having completed her BSc at China's Agricultural University. She's building on Ivan Kryukov's summer project …

NSERC CREATE programme

Over the summer seven faculty here at the University of Calgary discovered that we'd been awarded one of the prestigious NSERC CREATE programmes. Worth a wee bit under $2million, we are charged with setting up a graduate training programme in host-parasite interactions. In addition to the Calgary based stake-holders (see below) the programme involves a number …