Lab Life and News

2026

# We welcome Medha today. She just started as a summer intern funded by the Biochemical Society, UK. Medha is currently pursuing her MSc in Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Goa, India. 

# it was great to host Dr Osama Harraz who visited us yesterday and gave an excellent talk!

# Well done Yu to have a manuscript based on a major aspect of his PhD research - hope it finds a good home in near future 

# very happy to have contributed to this exciting study led by Professor Silivia Moreno 

# Well done Aida - for winning the 2nd best poster award in Cambridge Ion Channel Forum-BPS meeting this year

# Well done Lucas in presenting a poster a the Cambridge Ion Channel Forum - BPS meeting this year!

# very happy to have contributed to this excellent study led by Clemence and colleagues - I am glad that in silico modelling helped us to find the plausible binding site of such a small-sized ligand!

# Well done, Yu! Your first paper out of your ongoing PhD work just saw the light of the day - hope more are crawling up

# Well done Yu and Aida for presenting at the European Calcium Society Meeting held at Doha this year. 

2025

# Heartiest congrats to Aida for winning the best poster prize in the BPS meeting held at Belfast in Drug Discovery category sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

# Heartiest congrats to 'Dr' Sarah Han (the 8th from the lab) for successfully defending her PhD thesis today. And profound gratitude to the excellent examiners - Dr Janet Kumita and Dr Silvia Dragoni  for their time. Also my heartfelt thank to her AstraZeneca co-supervisor - Dr Marianne Schimpl for her time and help during Sarah's journey. Last but not the least, thanks a lot to Dr Laura Shippey to arrange some post viva cake and flowers on my behalf. 

# Shengxiao brought a super cake in our lab meeting (which then took control over the stage!) - and some of us definitely knew 'carpe diem' better than others! Sadly (i.e. the probability of having similar cakes is now vanishing small :-)) she is leaving us soon, after her 5 months of stay, but we won't say goodbye to her (as we never do for anyone). The door to our lab will remain open forever for any of our members - we are very much tuned to the last verse of Hotel California by the Eagles:

"We are programmed to receive

You can check-out any time you like

But you can never leave!" 

We wish you all the very BEST, Shengxiao (and the cake has nothing to do with this :-)

# Hurrah! our paper on the ExsA work is now live!

# Nivya (Dr Nivya James) visited us from our collaborator - Dr Pedro Ballester's lab in Imperial College and she gave an excellent presentation on her work on machine learning and re-scoring about structure-based drug discovery against an ion channel target.  Laura and Fatemeh (visiting from University of Geneva) joined me in welcoming Nivya. 

# Welcoming Dr Laura Shippey as the new member to our lab!

# welcoming Lucas who started this October as the new PhD student. Lucas did his MSc in Biochemistry from UCL and has interest in Protein Science and Drug Discovery. All the best wishes for him

# welcoming Jianinig (Dr Jianing Liu) as the new member of our group. Jianing is a structural biologist. He did his PhD in Prof. Adrian Goldman's lab at the University of Helsinki. His doctoral work just got published e-Life - well done Jianing!

# I created a youtube channel - Dr T's Pharm Tunes to help my students learn about the mechanism of action and names of some common drugs (am I going crazy! - but loving it totally)

# welcoming Shengxiao Qi as a visitor to our group. She is in her final year of PhD at the University of Copenhagen. Shengxiao does structural and computational biology as well as organic synthesis (goodness me!) 

2023

# Carols from The Rahman Lab Choir !

And we took a good selfie (I think) whilst wandering around the market square - the 2nd spectacular (i.e. with spectacles) person in the photo is Feng (Dr Feng Xue) who visited us from the University of Copenhagen from the Pless lab