Helminthology Graduate Course

A month has now passed since the close of the Fall Semester or Michaelmas Term, depending upon your vernacular. Over the last four months I coordinated three courses: Genetics & Molecular Biology, part of the DMV undergraduate programme. Advanced Topics in Microbiomes, a graduate course in the Veterinary Medical Sciences (VMS) programme. Helminthology, another graduate …

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 …

Evolutionary Spaghetti Networks

I'm busy preparing my three-hour stint at the 'Bioinformatics in Molecular Parasitology Workshop' @McGill in June. I've been given a pretty freehand on what to talk. Most of the preceding two and half days will be introducing them on the concepts of phylogenetics and molecular evolution - a huge thank you to Robin Beech for …