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 …

Bioinformaticians wanted in Calgary

Bioinformatics Analyst In the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, we're recruiting a Bioinformatics Analyst to support the growing number of bioinformatics and genomics projects undertaken by our researchers. For more details check out the posting. Faculty position in Genomics/Computational Biology The Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Faculty of Medicine is looking for someone to join …

Voluminous Veterinary Medical Sciences

Within the Veterinary Medical Sciences graduate program we are aware of the broad range of research undertaken by students with an even more extensive range of backgrounds (e.g. DVMs, biomedical sciences, ecologists and policy). I carried out my PhD studies in the now defunct Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, part of the University of …

Parasites @ Calgary Science Cafe

On the evening of May 28th, almost 100 members of the public and a smattering of UofC students crammed into the back room of the Ironwood Grill, Inglewood, to hear about parasites. Dr Patrick Hanington, of the University of Alberta's School of Public Health and UCVM's Dr John Gilleard, were the guest speakers at a …

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 …

Orchids and Parasitology

Parasitology touches upon or overlaps so many other sciences that a parasitologist probably has to stick his/her nose into more different fields of knowledge than any other kind of biologist. A parasitologist, like an orchid, requires long and careful nurturing, and develops slowly. But when he/she comes to flower he/she is a rare and beautiful …