Farncombe
Phage

Lab meeting proceeded in the absence of both myself and Jen last week. Here are the fruits of that meeting - I'm impressed. How come students are all so much more talented than their supervisor?

Félix and Hiba joined me on my annual pilgrimage to the CSM, this year hosted in Manitoba. Hiba is now the first student to have presented work from the lab at a conference, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel making the switch from presenter to observer... but Hiba did such a great job, she made the transition easy. Great work, Hiba!

My first opportunity to present data from the lab - and it couldn't have happened at a more impressive conference. Craig McCormick and Nathalie Grandvaux got the society up and running *and* hosted a phenomenal ~175 person inaugural CSV meeting. 

With a new cohort of recruits comes a new phage boot camp - most of a week learning the basics of phage visualizing, handling, storage, preservation, etc. This time, we were also joined by students from the Burrows, Surette and Hosseini-Doust labs.  Everyone in this picture was told to look busy.

`tis the season, apparently, for recognizing the achievments of team members. Last week Jason Tran (Right) was awarded a Deborah M. Brown scholarship for academic excellence entering the BDC program. At 5000$, that should buy a lot of yoghurt...

Topping off an exciting week in the lab, I've just been informed that Félix has been awarded an OGS scholarship for his PhD starting here in May. Congratulations Félix! He's not even in the province yet, and already making his presence felt in Ontario.

Clara wrote an article for plosibilities vulgarizing a scientific article she was interested in. I had nothing to do with the article choice, I promise!

Check out her work here. 

Clara returns from a trip to the capital, to present at SciNapse 2018 (UofO). That is a mighty fine looking poster (or, as Clara puts it "in person, the green wasn't as ugly as I thought it would be!")

The lab opened its doors. Hiba, Clara, Anisha and Jason joined me for an intensive phage "boot-camp", getting familiar with phage manipulation techniques. We performed the experiments in this paper - a great way to get to know phages, as well as several other basic techniques.