CMBI students win poster prizes at Department of Medicine Young Scientists Day

Congratulations to Vera Pader and Miles Priestman for winning 1st and 3rd prize respectively for their poster presentations at this annual event.

Young Scientist Day is a forum for research students and junior Postdocs to showcase their work and gain experience in presentation and dissemination.

Vera has just started the second year of her PhD in the laboratory of Dr Andrew Edwards. Her poster entitled ‘Characterisation of a cryptic daptomycin-resistance mechanism in Staphylococcus aureus’ detailed new findings on the link between quorum-sensing and the susceptibility of MRSA to daptomycin, an antibiotic of last resort.

Miles is also in the second year of his PhD with Dr Brian Robertson. The title of his poster was 'Drug tolerance in Mycobacteria: Using microfluidics and single-cell microscopy to investigate how mycobacteria survive antibiotics'.

Mycobacteria appear to be highly tolerant to antibiotic treatment, which may underlie the extensive six-month therapy required to completely cure tuberculosis. Miles' project seeks to understand some of the factors that allow a subset of mycobacterial cells to survive otherwise bactericidal antibiotics using single-cell approaches such as timelapse microscopy.