Blog posts

Ohayo Japan! おはよう日本!

As a first year PhDs, and following the recommendation of our elders we decided to go to a summer school (ss). The deadline for other summer schools in the Europe was already passed and the first one was the machine learning summer school (MLSS) in Japan. We were lucky enough to get accepted for poster presentation and we were granted a part of our travel expenses by the MLSS. The speakers were very well known in the field of statistical pattern recognition and machine learning and they delivered well. There were about 400 attendants from all over the world e.g. Argentina, Peru, US, Brazil, Belgium, Iran, Igor from Russia and our neighbour universities such as UCL, university of Cambridge. 

Funders Meeting Summer 2015

Monday the 29th of July

As the sun rose, a mere week after solstice, STRATiGRADs finest began to congregate in sporadic groups, spread far and wide across the capital. The air was dense, and the heat at this early hour already uncomfortable as drivers arrived; stepping into the air conditioned cool interior of these cars was welcome for all. Initial tardiness, manifested in the form of a boxer clad Frenchman answering the door, was duly noted by the author.

As the cars raced down the motorway discussion of the day ahead began in earnest and excitement built for those whose first trip this was.

Ki kati Uganda! (Howdy Uganda!)

Furthering the jet-set image we StratiGrad students seem to be getting, I spent January visiting the study sites for my PhD project. My project is a sub-study of a large transfusion trial (TRACT) taking place between 2 hospitals in eastern Uganda, so I was lucky enough to go out to set things up and get the ball rolling. A welcome side effect was missing the worst of the winter here in London, and managing to just miss the rainy season in Uganda too!

I visited the regional referral hospitals at Mbale and Soroti towns in eastern Uganda, the two sites where the sub-study will be run, spending the majority of the time in the slightly larger but significantly dustier town of Mbale.

Stratigrad Treasure Hunt

Following our 4th bi-annual Stratigrad-Funders meeting that was -as always- a STRESSFUL experience-especially for the newbies (Takoua, Paolo, Kevin &Sam)-, we needed to let off some steam. So what did we do? Did we just go to a pub and drunk our problems away? Absolutely not!!! We did it the Stratigrad-way! We embarked into a treasure hunt where we explored the festive London following a treasure trail! We formed 4 groups with ridiculous names and we followed the trail by solving the clues, we observed the signs and we collected ‘treasures’ that might or might not belong to a Roman Catholic Church.

A milestone and achievement by the Stratigrads

Gut Microbiome Research Using Molecular Biology and Multi-Omics Technologies is the title of postgraduate symposium organized by our STRATiGRAD cohorts – Fran and Nancy in collaboration with University College Cork (UCC) students.

Wednesday 24th Sep:

UCC guys arrived at Imperial College London (ICL) in the afternoon. Fran and Nancy took them around for mini-sightseeing of South Kensington Campus before attending welcome and introductory lectures by Prof Elaine Holmes and Dr Julian Marchesi. The first day was nice but it seemed like both UCC and ICL guys were a little bit shy to get to know each other – I may be wrong though lol.

Quite the jetsetters!

Anyone reading these blog posts must think all us StratiGrads do is travel, which obviously isn’t true. It’s been a whole month since I got back from my 5 weeks in China. Friends said to me that doing a PhD might provide opportunities to travel for conferences etc. but I didn’t quite expect this!

I applied to the Imperial International Summer School in Beijing having received an email from the Graduate School (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/international/opportunities/summer/tsinghua). Places are highly competitive and open to students in the first two years of their PhD. I fitted the criteria and have a burning desire to travel and experience new places that I couldn’t help but apply – fully expecting not to hear back.

Our first MSI conference

Our first MSI conference! Our first posters as Stratigrads!

This week, we got to present our PhD projects to the scientific community for the very first time. How exciting 🙂

Our journey started at 6 in the morning at St Pancras Station where we caught a train to Sheffield. Still half asleep, we got to Sheffield Hallam University at 9 where we were greeted with pale coffee (better than no coffee…).

The day started with talks from some big names from the Mass Spec Imaging community and 3 advanced PhD student presentations. After an informative morning (and 5 hours without food), we were served an excellent lunch and got to present our posters.

Fran’s France Fun

So this week we have all been recovering from a hectic week of: firstly, preparing for the funder’s meeting and then actually going to France for the meeting! We have a number of different funder’s who fund the Stratigrad programme and usually all of them come to Imperial College for the bi-annual meetings. However this time, the meeting was held at Servier Laboratories in Orleans, France.

We prepared our slides in a ‘PechaKucha‘ style presentation and had a few practices before we headed off – if you haven’t heard of this type of presenting yet, definitely look it up…It takes a lot of practice, trust me!

And now for something completely different

I considered writing this post about the trials and tribulations of the second year of my PhD, how data collection is finally ramping up in a meaningful way and how daunting the upcoming presentations and assessments are. That sounds pretty boring though, and someone else will do that over the next few weeks anyway so I’ll let them write something more interesting about science. In the interest of work-life balance, I’m going to write about my holiday last week instead with some nice pictures.

So I went to Las Vegas last week (the above is the view from our balcony).