Today, Jordan’s MSc work on Galactose History-Dependent-Behaviours, a foray into some unique biology reminescent of good ol’ diauxie, made it into preprint form! It’s extremely hard to keep to the academic work after graduating, bombarded with the demands of the real world (and a real job!) - and I’m very grateful he stuck with it, it’s a great story that needs to be out there!
At today’s Farncombe Research Day, Ayesha and Christine both picked up awards for their talk and poster, respectively. Which is awesome. But as an added icing on the cake, the keynote was a sci-comm specialist, and he hunted me down to say how exemplary my student’s talk was. Watching my trainees tell their stories way better than I ever could is one of my absolute favourite parts of the job.
Today, Ayesha’s first primary research article appeared on Biorxiv as we hurtle towards submission. This is a huge achievement, and given it’s only a year into her PhD (technically), also evidence of some truly remarkable productivity.
If you’ve followed the lab at all, you know we spend a lot of time trying to wake (induce) phages in new and interesting ways. And you might have wondered “Can we force them to sleep?”. And… the answer is sort of, but in a way that might prove extremely clinically relevant! If you want to know why, you can either try to decipher the figure without a legend, or read the paper here.
The students are anticipating my alliterations - they fed me this picture with the caption included! At today’s RIP, last year’s best presentations were given awards - here’s Eve’s for best MSc talks! If you go back to the June 24th post, you’ll see it was flagged at the time as an exemplar… so while this isn’t a surprise, it’s a welcome acknowledgement!
It’s tradition - lab shutdown, lab cleanup, I provide lunch while we all scrub on hands & knees, toss out old solutions (problems?). In a break from tradition - no Rabia, who, away at a conference, is missing her first lab cleanup since May 2019 (!). Next up - 3 days of Phage Boot Camp.
At Rabia’s initiative, we were able to get the gang together for bowling - in part to celebrate Gayatri’s return. Christine’s LO joined, but did not wish to appear in the picture. Eve hussled us all, from ‘I can’t lift this ball, I’m weak like a baby deer’ to dominating the first game. Gotta watch that one…
In a rather unusual turn, I found out our latest paper was published when a colleague asked me for a reprint! After a very long run up, it’s finally out in MMBR - “To Lyse or Not to Lyse: Biasing Bacteriophage Behaviours”. Huge congratulations to Rabia, who initially conceived of this - and if you want an overview of how we think about the main research thrust of the lab, you can’t get any better than this
See, I was going to go with “Terrific” too, but my students beat me to it and I think that means I can’t use it. Yesterday, the BBS summer scholars program closed off with their symposium, and Teneilia put together a wonderfully accessible showcase of her work in the lab over the last 10 weeks. That’s such a short time to learn, carry out, and then teach/present everything, and I’m extremely impressed at the skills on display by this entire cohort!
It seems crazy that we’re already halfway through the summer, and crazier still that it means its time to introduce some of our incoming Fall 2026 cohort. Check out the “our team” to meet Lucas, Aveer, and Kirsten - all of whom will be around for the Fall!
Rabia was selected to attend the Basel In vitro modelling course she’s had her eye on since Urs Jenal came to Mac and shared his research. This is quite a competitive process, and a big milestones! She’ll be exploring Switzerland this Fall - you can see the course offerings here
“Beautiful talk, beautiful slides - a model for how these kinds of presentations should be” - Institute Director. ‘Nuff Said? Eve gave her first RIP ever, and - unsurprisingly - nailed it.
The latin isn’t mine. I won’t claim I’m not that pretentious (I am!) - but this time I’m blameless. At the Phage Therapy Event at UofT yesterday, I was awarded a paddle/trident for my contributions to Phage Canada. It was a celeration of some real headway made in the phage therapy landscape, and an honour to be featured at the event!
Picture a bit unusual? This is the awesome Wee Book Inn on Whyte, in Edmonton. The more academic pictures/group shots are in the full article, but this was our wonderful annual pilgrimage to the CSM, with posters by Niousha, Eve and Christine, and a talk (in the fungal section!) by Rabia. Rabia and I are CSM regulars, but this was Niousha & Eve’s first go - and Christine’s second. It was a blast, as always. The running was good too :P.
BBS Olympiad, Barbeque… and a record in updating the lab group picture, to (Technically) only 10 days since the most recent addition. Not bad… launching into conference season.
This was Niousha’s first RIP, and she knocked it out of the park. A tonne of work went into crafting this story and making it accessible, and it paid off - it was a wonderfully approachable take on this. Congratulations.
Twice in the last year, I got ‘suckered’ into reviewing two papers for the same journal because they were thematically linked. In this case, no good deed goes unrewarded - both journals asked me to highlight the papers in question. Back in January, Christine got to showcase the “Perfect Predators Persist” story, and now, in May, Ayesha gets to share this gem on phage-phage communication.
Neat too that just last week, Dr. Penades was here at Mac to discuss his research.
Our Trio of new undergrads joined us for their inaugural lab cleanup, which was - for reasons of leave - at least four months overdue. As you can tell from the gleaming surfaces behind them, though, we were all up to the task!
As if to celebrate my return from pat leave yesterday, the world was not content for me simply to bike in without any dismounts in the conservation area. No, today was action-packed: Ayesha (U)’s top-notch RIP, Tejas & Ayesha (A)’s thesis day presentations. What a celebration of the good science that went on without me… here’s hoping my return doesn’t mess anything up.
In a pattern of absenteeism (this leave, honestly!), I missed yet another sci-comm triumph at this year’s BBSRS. The main picture here is Tejas, an undergrad with his first ever poster (looking slick!) - but click through for Eve and Christine’s appearances as well!
Regrettably, Pat leave got in the way of me attending a rip-roaring RIP of Christine’s. On the bright side, it was so good (and she was proud enough of it) that she then walked me through the final version at our one-on-one… so I got a pretty good feel for it. Some serious scicomm chops here!
