Welcome to the MRC WIMM blog, a blog aimed at a scientifc, but non-specialist, audience. All posts are written by members of the MRC WIMM!
Genetics and Lego project with Abingdon & Witney College
Dr Katherine Wood, a postdoctoral researcher in the Goriely lab and Junior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Personalised Medicine, writes about her recent public engagement event with students on the creative media course at Abingdon and Witney College.
Rapidly developing generative AI models: Friend or Foe?
Professor Hashem Koohy - an Alan Turing Fellow in Health and Medicine from MRC Human Immunology Unit - responds to Intel’s recent announcement of Aurora genAI, a new state-of-the-art Generative AI model for science with 1 trillion parameters.
'Women, Life, Freedom' – not just a slogan
In a personal blog post, Associate Professor Hashem Koohy (MRC WIMM Group Leader and RDM PI) talks about how a slogan used across the Middle East needs to be more than a slogan.
Innate Immunity: A Deadly Defence
The MRC’s annual science writing competition, the Max Perutz Science Writing Prize, challenges MRC-funded PhD students to communicate the importance of their research to a non-scientifically trained audience in 800 words or less. This year, Lizzie Horton from the WIMM/HIU submitted the following excellent entry. Lizzie Horton is a DPhil student in the Rehwinkel Group.
The 2021 MRC WIMM Christmas Decorating Competition
21 December 2021
In this festive item, we look at how MRC WIMM researchers turned their science into decorations as part of the 2021 Christmas decorations competition.
One-stop shop for science at the IF Festival 2021
October 2021 saw the MRC WIMM’s first in-person Public Engagement event since March 2020. The IF Oxford Festival aimed to engage people from across Oxford with current academic research. Gulnar Abdullayeva, a DPhil student in the Bodmer Group, volunteered at the MRC WIMM stall. In this piece she describes her experience.
Cracking the 3p21.31 COVID-19 mystery.
4 November 2021
Damien Downes, the senior Postdoctoral Scientist in the Hughes’ Genome Biology Group, shares the story behind identifying LZTFL1 as an effector gene at a COVID-19 risk locus, work which was published in Nature Genetics today.
Have yourselves a Merry Little WIMMas
17 December 2019
In this festive post, we look at how MRC WIMM staff and students once again turned their science into decorations, as part of the 2019 Christmas decorations competition.
The Trojan Octopus
6 December 2019
Martyna Lukoseviciute, a PhD student in Tatjana Sauka-Spengler’s group, shares the story behind her winning image of an octopus embryo and the unexpected lessons she has learnt from it.
Childhood ALL: Same same but different!
For Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Dr Andi Roy explains current challenges in the treatment of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia and how research at the MRC WIMM is trying to tackle them.
The challenges of being a postdoc
20 September 2019
To mark Postdoc Appreciation Week Lise Chauveau, Chair of the MRC WIMM Postdoc Association, reflects on the challenges of being a postdoc, and explains how the association is developing initiatives to support and encourage this peer group.
Machine learning meets microscopy - Subjectivity dethroned
8 August 2019
How can we remove subjectivity from science, whilst keeping the human in the loop?
CRISPR-Cas9 – what’s left to know?
23 July 2019
Dominic Owens, PhD student in the De Bruijn group at MRC MHU, recounts how puzzling results and a fortuitous lab meeting uncovered unexpected outcomes of CRISPR editing and changed the direction of his research.
From The Gambia to Oxford
Post Doctoral Researcher Caitlin Naylor discusses her experiences living and working at MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM.