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Department of Pharmacology

 

Department of Pharmacology Seminar Series

Seminars will be held as usual in the Departmental Seminar Room at 16:00 on Fridays in Full Term. After the talk there will be tea and cake and a chance to talk informally with the speaker.

If anyone wishes to have some time with any speaker before the talk, please contact Professor Mark Howarth in advance.

If you would like to see previous talks, or to access previous recordings, please click here. You can also access our YouTube playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe8pAmQe8MdGWxOJlmff94P0J0rTn0LEK

Schedule for Michaelmas 2024

Refreshments and snacks will be provided for all in-person talks, after the conclusion of each talk. This will be held in the breakout space.

Friday 18th October, 16:00

Dr Liuhong Chen

Vice President of Platform Innovation, Bicycle Therapeutics

Title TBC

Biography: Liuhong Chen joined Bicycle Therapeutics in 2011, currently serving as Vice President of Discovery and responsible for overseeing early-stage research projects for Bicycle’s internal and partnered pipelines. Having spent more than a decade developing Bicycle’s unique, chemically-constrained phage display platform, she is a named inventor and author on over 40 patents and peer-reviewed journal articles relating to the discovery and design of Bicycle® molecules. Including several that have progressed to clinical development. She holds a MSci in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge, where she studied under Professor Chris Abell.

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84914401352?pwd=OTmf13b45149bqpP8pMdPao2MbStVP.1


Friday 1st November, 16:00

Professor Syma Khalid

Professor of Computational Microbiology, University of Oxford

Title TBC

Biography: Syma graduated with a first class degree in Chemistry from the University of Warwick in 2000. She remained at Warwick to read for a PhD under the supervision of Prof. P. Mark Rodger. After obtaining her PhD in 2003, she moved to the University of Oxford as a postdoc in Prof Mark Sansom’s lab, to study the structure-function relationship of bacterial outer membrane proteins. During her postdoctoral work, she became interested in the application of molecular simulation techniques to problems in bionanotechnology. In 2007, she was appointed as RCUK fellow in chemical biology at the University of Southampton. In 2010, she was appointed to a lectureship at Southampton and promoted to full Professor in 2016. In 2021 she was appointed as Professor of Computational Microbiology at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College. Syma is the chair of HECBioSim and is on the Council of the Biophysical Society. She currently holds an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/88426003261?pwd=pT5dvnNsbdz47BjbWJDMtaA2Irqx4W.1


Friday 8th November, 16:00

Dr Ritwick Sawarkar

Group Leader, MRC Toxicology, Incoming Pharmacology UTO

Harnessing the principles of cellular resilience for therapeutics

Biography: Ritwick studied Microbiology and Biochemistry in Mumbai (India) and obtained his PhD in 2010 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Ritwick then moved to the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of ETH-Zürich in Basel (Switzerland) as a postdoctoral fellow with Renato Paro. In 2014, Ritwick started his own independent group at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg (Germany), before moving to the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2019. Ritwick received the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2018 and Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award in 2019.

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82092579815?pwd=Uqk8lOUxeQHmbZNI9b1Jj8n0AlasSl.1


Friday 15th November, 16:00

Dr Ivana Bjedov

Principal Research Fellow, University College London Cancer Institute

Delaying and Measuring ageing

Biography: Ivana Bjedov earned a BSc degree in Molecular Biology from University of Zagreb. She did her PhD at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, in the laboratory of Prof. Miroslav Radman, where she learned about DNA repair in E. coli. Her interest in ageing research started when she moved to University College London, where she was a postdoctoral EMBO fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Linda Partridge. Her postdoc was focused on understanding how manipulating the mTOR pathway using rapamycin improves health and extends lifespan in Drosophila. She joined UCL Cancer Institute upon obtaining ERC Starting Grant and her laboratory is interested in DNA repair and protein synthesis. Recently she became CRUK Senior Cancer Research Fellow and part of the CRUK RadNet City of London network.

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86464289375?pwd=3NRikq0pEH2mWvsMBj1YlXam1AJdt5.1


Friday 22nd November, 16:00

Dr William McEwan

Group Leader, University of Cambridge UK Dementia Research Institute

Redirecting innate immune mechanisms against aggregated proteins

Biography: A Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Prof Will McEwan joined the UK DRI in 2017 following his postdoctoral training at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Will trained as a viral immunologist and during his postdoc co-discovered and characterised the novel antibody receptor TRIM21. At the UK DRI at Cambridge, he will utilise his expertise in viral infection and apply it in the context of protein misfolding in neurodegenerative disease.

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86412712924?pwd=I7YBqbdQNaEixwJucXK5UKPcJ6OxoB.1


Friday 29th November, 16:00

Postdoctoral Researcher Talks

Dr Javier Aguilera Lizarraga

Research Associate, Smith Group

Intestinal nociceptive signalling beyond gut pain and the strength of the ‘naked’ mucosal barrier

Biography: Javier obtained his BSc and MSc in Biotechnology in Health Sciences at the University of Lleida, in Spain, and then moved to Belgium to perform his doctoral studies at KU Leuven. In 2019, he completed his PhD in Biomedical Sciences and continued his postdoctoral training in the same lab in Belgium. During his PhD and first postdoc, Javier investigated the impact of immune mediators on afferent nerves as a mechanism underlying the development of visceral pain. In June 2022, he joined the group of Ewan St. John Smith at the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral scientist to work on the Advanced Discovery of Visceral Analgesics via Neuroimmune Targets and the Genetics of Extreme human phenotypes (ADVANTAGE) consortium, as part of the MRC Advanced Pain Discovery Platform (APDP). Furthermore, he has continued to study neuro-immune mechanisms in the context of pain, expanded his research to investigate the (patho)physiological consequences of pain-sensing neuron activation in the gut microenvironment, and also explored the gastrointestinal tract of naked mole-rats.

 

Dr Anwit Pandit

Research Associate, Sawarkar Group

Title TBC

Biography: Anwit completed his Bachelors in Microbiology from the University of Pune and Masters in Microbiology from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India. After gaining some research experience in mammalian cell biology at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he joined the Sawarkar Lab at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany funded by the CIBSS Centre For Integrative Biological Signalling Studies in 2019. Anwit is a part of the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM). Anwit moved to the MRC Tox Unit, Cambridge along with the lab in 2021, where he is continuing his PhD.