Earlier this month I have spent a few days at Janelia at the Neuro-Evo conference . Heard about brains of many interesting weird animals, met lovely people and got to tell them about what I do too. And realised that Janelia hotel reminds me of an observation hive 🙂
On Wednesday and Friday this week I was taking part in the British Science Week events for local schools, organised by our Fly Facility: mutant Drosophila and larval painting fun 😀
Today I gave my first undergraduate lecture – in the first year course Excitable Cells at Manchester. The lecture was about visual systems. On Thursday I will give the second one, about all other sensory modalities. Crazy short time for the topic but oh well! At least I’m trying to use nice research images 🙂
This past week has really been full of xmas presents that have arrived just in time before the global shutdown and worldwide food coma. The main present is the VILLUM Young Investigator award (yes, I am also impressed by the amount of mold on that plate) that I received to establish a lab in Denmark in 2019. I am very happy and excited about it, and will probably need a good holiday to digest this news and come up with the lab name, but this is upcoming 🙂
Last Saturday the 21st of October I was helping out at the Science Spectacular public event at the Museum. We were showing mutant flies and had a shoot-a-brain-region game for the kiddies – was a lot of fun! 🙂
Last Friday the 29th of September I took part in the public engagement event called Science Uncovered/ European Researchers Night. I had 8 amazing volunteers helping me to tell people about how flies and mosquitoes perceive smells, and how this is related to the spread of malaria across the world. We and the visitors had a lot of fun! Much more than I expected from the last-minute preparations of my first ever outreach activity that I designed by myself 🙂 Will definitely do it again, have a lot of ideas about how it could be improved for the next time.
I am just back from ESITO XV that took place in beautiful Villasimius, Sardinia. I’m pretty sure this has been my best conference so far – the science was very relevant, and the location is just perfect 🙂 Can’t wait for the next ESITO in two years’ time! #esito2017
I am currently in Plymouth at the Microelectrode course, learning to poke thin glass needles into cells and see what happens 🙂 More info here: @CPW_Plymouth
Christian Brandt has made a very nice climate monitoring and notification system for my mosquito room. It checks temperature and humidity every minute and sends me an email if either of these two parameters are out of the permitted interval. In addition, it logs the data into a google spreadsheet (yes, you can now monitor climate in my insectary too! 🙂 ) every 10 minutes. Doesn’t take up much space at all, all it needs is a power source and a wi-fi connection.
If you’d like to build one for yourself, ask Christian how!
Today I got a good evidence that my new genetic tool has worked! Now need to pedal through a long list of experiments for the new paper, but the good news it that there will be a paper!
