Great to see this really cool paper out, exploring how sustainable bioelectronic fibres can be printed on different biological structures and used to sense properties of living organisms. https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.24324106.v1

Time has flown by since finishing my PhD and I am now well into my first year of postdoc. So far it’s been fun to work on a new model system (the chicken embryo), have a go at some set-up engineering, and develop new methods to investigate the forces involved in early central nervous system morphogenesis.

I’m attempting to catch up on things after a long pause from updating my website. First up – my PhD paper was published on BioRxiv and then in a special issue of Development. In this paper we investigated how the morphogenesis of one tissue can physically deform its neighbouring tissues to contribute to the elongation of the embryo head-to-tail axis. Using targeted multi-photon ablations I disrupted notochord morphogenesis by preventing the expansion of notochord vacuoles. Surprisingly segmentation-associated posterior body elongation was robust to near-complete notochord ablation. However, we found that notochord vacuole expansion facilitates the elongation of the axis at …

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2018.03.009

‘Tis the season for PhD programme interviews and I’ve recently been asked by a few people for advice on how best to prepare, so I thought I’d share a few tips that might be useful for you to reflect on if you are in the process of prepping for your interview. It doesn’t feel like that long ago when I was getting ready to head off to interviews for PhD programmes. My first interview was in Cambridge. I was pretty nervous as I’d had a pretty disastrous interview experience a few years before when I’d applied to Cambridge Uni for …

I am about 3 months into my PhD now, so I thought I’d give an update on what it’s been like up to now. So far I’ve mostly learnt things about myself and the way I work best, rather than anything to do with understanding a scientific question. I guess that isn’t surprising as I’ve mainly been playing around with different techniques, trying things, and seeing what works. Having the chance to explore different ideas has been great and I think it’s really important to have that kind of opportunity at the beginning of any scientific project. Much of my …