̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - postgraduate

New PhD funding programme launched

ps748 — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:17:11 +0000

Trinity College and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s new £48 million programme enabling fully-funded PhDs has been launched.

Black researchers shaping the future

ta385 — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:32:12 +0000

As the UK marks Black History Month, researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� talk about their route to Cambridge, their inspiration and their motivation.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Conservationists gather to mark International Women's Day

ed515 — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 16:08:16 +0000

̽��ֱ��event, jointly organised by the Museum and the Cambridge Conservation Forum’s Women in Conservation Leadership Network, was held to mark International Women’s Day and included a keynote lecture by Professor Rebecca Kilner from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

Kilner said; “Events like this are important for showing the next generation that anyone with a spark for science can work in science subjects. They are designed to excite and encourage young people to pursue their interests - and not to be held back by their gender, race or background.”

̽��ֱ��Museum welcomed over 100 visitors to the event, which included ‘meet the scientist’ stalls, a poster exhibition, and a sneak-peek at the newly refurbished Whale Hall.

More than 30 women working in different scientific fields took part, from organisations including the United Nations’ Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, the RSPB and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. They were joined by staff and volunteers from the museum, and Cambridge postgraduate students.

Dr Rosalyn Wade, the Museum’s Interpretation and Learning Officer, helped to coordinate the event. She said; “A key role for the Museum is engaging with the public and raising awareness of work in biological and environmental sciences.

“It’s important to raise awareness of the different kinds of careers available in scientific fields. A number of our visitors were GCSE and A-Level students, and it was a great opportunity for them to see the range of roles that might be available to them in the future.

“We also had lots of new mums who are thinking about a career change and were interested to learn more about different areas. It was great to see such a diverse range of people.”

̽��ֱ��Museum has undergone a massive redevelopment, and will officially re-open to the public on 23 June.

Scientists from around the world gathered at the Museum of Zoology yesterday to celebrate and promote the work of women in conservation.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Postgraduate Open Day 2017 - meet our postgrads

sjr81 — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 16:05:42 +0000

These students walk in the footsteps of giants: Francis Crick, Elizabeth Blackburn, Stephen Hawking, Iris Murdoch and Eric Hobsbawm all pursued PhD research here.

We thought you might like the opportunity to meet a few of them ...

Nearly 10,000 postgraduate students from more than 250 countries, working in countless different subject areas, contribute to Cambridge’s thriving postgraduate community.

Jerelle Joseph, PhD in computational chemistry at Churchill College (Gates Scholar)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

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Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #5

ta385 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000

Fifth in the series is Eleanor Barnett, a historian examining the relationship between food and religious change during the European Reformations.

My research sets out to

Focusing on England and Italy, I look at how food was used in worship both within and outside of the church, how religion shaped people’s ideas of what was healthy to eat, and how religion impacted on the ways and material environments in which people ate in everyday life.

One of the most important theological changes of the Reformation was the Protestant rejection of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. I’m interested in how this worked out in what people were actually eating in the Communion.

In England, Elizabeth I wrote in her Prayer Book of 1559 that the Communion bread should be table bread of the best quality, but in the same year the Queen’s Injunctions state that the bread should be more like the pre-Reformation Catholic wafer so that ‘the more reverence to be given to these holy mysteries’. She called for the traditional stamp to be removed from the wafer and for the wafer to be made a little wider and thicker.

This is interesting because it shows that whilst, in accordance with a changed understanding of grace and salvation in Protestant theology, there was a drive in Elizabethan England to remove material things that could be worshiped, there remained a desire to make sure that what you were commemorating was still reflected in material properties. So in this case, the bread still had to be in some way special.

At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, attempts were made to enforce the Injunctions but by the 1570s, it became clear that table bread was more commonly used.

My Motivation

̽��ֱ��most important thing for me is to understand how people experienced religion in the early modern period. More specifically, I hope to get across that people in the past were not intellectualized beings always concerned with theology, but were interacting with their bodies and the material environment every day in ways that reflected or enforced their religious identity. Food is a really useful way to explore the lived experience of what it meant to be a Protestant or a Catholic in this period.

Everyone has to eat so food is a great way for us in the twenty-first century to connect with people in the past on a human level. Food was and remains so central to human identities.

I’m really interested in public history initiatives and I’m an Editor for the blog, Doing History in Public so my research topic and philosophy as a historian go hand-in-hand.

My best days

A highlight for me has been looking at the really unusual and significant Elizabethan records at King’s College, Cambridge. These record day-by-day what was being eaten in the College. This is invaluable evidence for me because its shows how far people were adhering to the Church’s instructions regarding food, in particular what could be consumed on the weekly Fish Days, Lent and religious feast days.

I discovered that throughout the period, King’s College adhered to eating fish on Friday and Saturday and avoiding meat during Lent. There were, however, times in Lent when the College was prepared to celebrate. In 1560, the Feast of Annunciation occurred during Lent and the College hosted a really big feast, five times more expensive than a normal Monday.

I have also seen significant changes in the Elizabethan period reflected in what was happening at King’s. For instance, by 1576 the College had abandoned the Feast of St Barnabas in accordance with the New Calendar, but started celebrating the Queen’s Day on 17 November to celebrate Elizabeth’s coronation.

I hope my work will lead to

My PhD research will contribute to our understanding of what it meant to be a Protestant and a Catholic in Reformation Europe, through exploring the embodied, sensory, and everyday religious experience of eating.

By taking a comparative approach, I hope that this theme will shed new light on the differences between Catholic and Protestant identities, and ultimately comment on the nature of religious change in the Reformation periods.

It had to be Cambridge because

I am lucky enough to have two fantastic historians as my supervisors, Professor Craig Muldrew and Professor Ulinka Rublack, and to be further supported by a brilliant wider team of historians. We meet in seminars every week and the graduate students also have workshops where you can share ideas and hear papers.

At the same time, at Cambridge you’re given the freedom to grow as an independent researcher and to develop new skills through practical experience - I am currently improving my Italian and paleographical skills by researching in the Venetian archives!

I particularly like the emphasis on inter-disciplinary work at Cambridge, so for me that means I can speak to art historians and scientists about how the body functions, how it was thought to function in the past, and how this might affect food and consumption practices in the Reformation period.

It’s an everyday inspiration to be surrounded by art and architecture from the period you are studying, not least in my own College, Christ’s. But Cambridge also plays a much more active role in my research because some of the Colleges hold such rich early modern records.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 November), we introduce five PhD candidates who are already making waves at Cambridge.

Food was and remains so central to human identities.

Eleanor Barnett, PhD student

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #4

ta385 — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 11:07:45 +0000

Fourth in the series is Yesim Yaprak Yildiz, a sociologist exploring the relationship between political violence, truth and reconciliation with a focus on Turkey.

My research sets out to

My passion is to understand the relationship between truth and justice, more specifically whether revelation of truth about an atrocity would lead to justice. I set out to answer this question by examining the social and political effects of public confessions of state officials on past atrocities against civilians. I focus on Turkey and state violence against the Kurds in the 1990s.

My motivation

I have been working on human rights violations in Turkey, particularly on torture and impunity, for over ten years. Turkey’s failure to account for the collective political violence in its history has been one of the main reasons which motivated me to pursue a PhD on this topic. Questioning approaches that establish a linear link between confession, truth and justice, I have sought to understand the workings of power in the confessional form of truth telling.

Day-to-day

I am currently in the final year of my PhD so I spend most of my time either at the library or at home writing my thesis. When I visit the department to meet my supervisor and fellow PhD students, I usually study at the ‘Attic’, the study space provided for PhD students in the department. It provides quite an appealing atmosphere thanks to student initiatives including writing groups and coffee breaks. Due to my part-time job at the Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study at ̽��ֱ�� of London, I also commute between London and Cambridge.

My best days

Cambridge is a unique place not only to indulge in solitary intellectual work but also to socialize with fellow academics in a wide range of events. As one of the conveners of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network, a research group at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, I also organise seminars on performance and performativity related themes. One of the seminars I recently organised featured Professor Leigh Payne from the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford. It was a particularly special occasion for me as I decided to study confessions after I heard her talk at a workshop in Denmark.

I hope my work will lead to

I want to contribute to the academic literature on political violence, truth and reconciliation, and thereby inform decision makers, scholars and broader public on some specific aspects of achieving and keeping peace by addressing the need for justice. More importantly, I hope my research will make people reflect on the roots of denial not only caused by forms of silencing but also by certain forms of speech.

While I am planning to pursue an academic career, I would like to continue working in grassroots movements and NGOs on human rights violations. My future projects will involve both elements of research and art. Through interactive and creative projects, I aim to reflect upon alternative ways of working through the past.

It had to be Cambridge because

̽��ֱ��best part of studying at Cambridge has been its fulfilling and vibrant intellectual environment. In addition to the wide-ranging academic events featuring renowned scholars and research methods courses, I also had the chance to attend a short film making course which enhanced my digital story-telling skills. I have been very lucky to have an inspiring environment in the department thanks to the encouragement and support of my supervisor, Professor Patrick Baert.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 November), we introduce five PhD students who are already making waves at Cambridge.

I'm planning to pursue an academic career while continuing to work in grassroots movements and NGOs on human rights violations.

Yesim Yaprak Yildiz

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #2

ta385 — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:39:35 +0000

Second in the series is Sarah Harrison, a final year PhD student in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, whose research highlights the importance of extra-embryonic cells and cell interactions.

My research sets out to

My research tries pick apart what takes you from a single fertilized egg through to a body with head, tail and limbs and internal organs through embryonic development. And we mostly look at the mouse embryo to answer these questions and look at changes in cell shape, cell behavior and cell fate decisions along the way.

Day-to-day

Rather than using whole mouse embryos to answer these questions about development, I derive stem cell populations from the embryos and maintain these in culture. What this means is that most of the time I’m standing in a small tissue culture room with my arms underneath a tissue culture hood to keep the cells happy and sterile. And then we grow the cells up and perform assays on how gene expression is changing when we change their culture conditions and try and plate them in scaffolds of 3D to generate embryo like structures. When I’m not in the culture room, I’m dissecting embryos, I’m down at the animals house looking after our transgenic mouse colonies and some of the time I’m sitting down doing data analysis. I’m in quite a collaborative group, so it’s rare that it’s just one person working on one question. Actually we’ve got lots of questions and we try to use all of our tools and expertise to answer them most effectively.

My best days

My favourite period in the lab was when I was just starting to put together the work that went on to get us a first author publication. That was when I was combining embryonic stem cells with stem cells that I’d derived from extra embryonic tissues, so tissues that would go on to form the placenta. Combining these two cell types in a dish started to generate, through self-organisational processes, structures that looked like embryos. And when I first saw this I couldn’t believe my eyes, it was amazing, and I couldn’t wait to tell my supervisor. And even though it was still quite early days, it showed that our hypothesis about interactions between embryonic and extra-embryonic cells being really important in generating a body, was working, so that was great.

I hope my work will lead to

I hope my PhD research will help the mouse embryology field at least to see the importance of cell interactions, and that it’s not just about the cells that go on to make the body but also the extra-embryonic cells that nourish the embryo. So hopefully it will provide a new slant on early embryology. For me personally, I feel I’ve drilled right down into an incredibly precise area of life science. Now I’d like to broaden out a little bit and perhaps go into science publishing to be able to communicate these really interesting discoveries, many of which are happening right here in Cambridge.

It had to be Cambridge because

In terms of developmental biology, there is nowhere like Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��building I’m in now is where scientists pioneered IVF, for instance. So that history is a major factor for people, but it’s not just about past breakthroughs, it’s about what’s going on now. I can go across the road to another building and chat to someone who is developing ways to encapsulate cells in tiny beads of gel, and really high tech, high through-put methods are being developed all around. And so it’s a great place to develop your research, not just in the techniques you know and love, but to expand and be more collaborative. On top of that, socially it’s great. We can go to lots of different institutes, and develop not just professional collaborations but also social collaborations, where we share ideas and results to get feedback. Having all these clever people around is a big benefit for developing.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 Nov), we introduce five PhD candidates who are already making waves at Cambridge.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, it was amazing, and I couldn’t wait to tell my supervisor.

Sarah Harrison, final year PhD student

Sarah Harrison

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #1

ta385 — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:00:00 +0000

First in the series is Himansha Singh, a Pharmacologist from India whose research aims to help tackle antimicrobial resistance.

My research sets out to

Today, we can survive an organ transplant but then die because of a bacterial infection. ̽��ֱ��rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and ‘superbugs’, along with the lack of antibiotic development in the last decades, is a major concern for global healthcare. Whilst there are several mechanisms responsible for AMR, our research group is examining multidrug efflux pumps or transporters that expel drugs rendering bacteria resistant to a broad range of antibiotics.

While we know some things about the architecture of bacteria, we don’t fully understand how they conduct transportation of antibiotics. If we could understand their operating system, we could develop compounds, which might help switching off the system and stop them from rejecting antibiotics. In particular, my project is looking into a very interesting E.coli ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter MsbA. We are working towards characterising how this protein uses energy to operate dynamic changes in its structure to facilitate drug transport.

My Motivation

During my master's degree, I worked with AstraZeneca and my neighbouring lab was working on transporters in drug development. Their work caught my attention. I also visited India that summer and my hometown, Gwalior, in Madhya Pradesh, was suffering a severe outbreak of tuberculosis and typhoid. These experiences exposed me to the seriousness of antibiotic resistance. Transporters play a huge role in this and after reading up on the topic, I looked for a relevant PhD project and was delighted to be accepted into Dr Hendrik W. van Veen's lab to work on various transporters, both in humans and bacteria.

Day-to-day

I am based in the Department of Pharmacology, which is in the city center – it’s a great location. I work in a team of ten and my average day in the lab is spent working on culturing liters of bacterial cells to extract MsbA and reconstitute it in artificial lipid membranes. I then test MsbA activity under different energy conditions and drugs, or test different inhibitors.

My best days

That has to be when we first noticed that the ATP dependent transporter MsbA could also work without ATP. ATP is an energy currency of cells and ABC transporters, such as MsbA, utilize it as their main source of power for drug transport. But we showed that MsbA is also dependent on another form of energy source, an electrochemical gradient. In fact, MsbA cannot function without the involvement of both of these power sources. That brought a paradigm shift in our understanding of translocation by MsbA, which may lead us to new ways to tackle bacteria.

I hope my work will lead to

Apart from being a multidrug transporter, MsbA is an essential membrane protein that transports phospholipids in E.coli to form its cell membrane; so inhibiting this pump is clinically important to develop or establish foundations for a new class of antibiotics against E.coli. We can only design inhibitors if we know the fundamental basis of their transport mechanism and I hope my PhD research will provide some insight into this. We believe that our findings will be of great interest to the wider scientific community.

It had to be Cambridge because

My supervisor, Dr. Hendrik W. van Veen has played a crucial role in developing my enthusiasm for scientific research. And Cambridge has provided a tight-knit, supportive and stimulating intellectual environment which has shaped my career and understanding of academia in really important ways. Other than benefiting from the world-class research facilities in my lab and department, I’ve been able to immerse myself in Cambridge’s rich culture and exciting critical atmosphere. ̽��ֱ��collegiate system also ensures a thriving social life and this paved the way for me to develop interests in various other disciplines over formal dinners and drinks in our college bars.

In 2017, Himansha Singh was one of twelve PhD students to win an award from the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast approaching (3 Nov), we introduce five PhD students who are already making waves at Cambridge.

I have benefited from world-class research facilities and immersed myself in Cambridge’s rich culture.

Himansha Singh

Himansha Singh, Dept of Pharmacology

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes