A warm welcome to our new Mchem Students, Oliver Crosby, Valeria Cobiltean and Hannah Hamilton who joined the group in January 2022. We hope to give them a rich experience learning from the diverse and fascinating science happening in the group and getting involved in our outreach activities.
We are recruiting! If you are interested in joining a vibrant, friendly and inclusive chemical biology team and work in a brand new chemical biology lab in the heart of Newcastle city centre, please apply here. We are looking to appoint two highly motivated and ambitious Research Assistants/Associates in Chemical Biology. We would like you to be suitably qualified with knowledge of: – Organic Chemistry / Chemical biology – Cell biology This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the Cancer Research UK programme funded work on histone demethylases (KDMs), a class of enzymes involved in epigenetic signalling. Dysregulation of some KDMs is strongly linked to cancer and some are… Read More »We are recruiting!
Earlier this month, Tom McAllister left his role as senior research associate in the group to start his prestigious five-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He will develop new ways to understand how proteins and carbohydrates interact. Projects include determining how human glycosylating enzymes implicated in cancer recognise their protein targets, furthering our fundamental understanding and paving the way for new diagnostics or treatments. Another is developing a novel alternative mode of treatment for the wheat pathogen, Z. tritici the causative agent of septoria leaf blotch disease. Z. tritici causes losses of ~20% crop yield and current fungicidal treatment costs €1B/year in Europe alone – this research will allow the… Read More »Tom starts his Royal Society University Research Fellowship
A virtual CRUK Programme Meeting took place on Friday 10th December 2021. Great to get an overview of CRUK work across the Kawamura Group at Newcastle and the Schofield group at Oxford and set some goals for our research in 2022. Some engaging discussions on the latest developments in the field and a useful workshop on manuscripts to finish the meeting. Looking forward to getting together in person next time hopefully!
We bid a fond farewell to Dr Hilal Sarac who leaves the group this week for an exciting role as a senior scientist at Cancer Research UK, Target Discoveries Laboratory in the Francis Crick Institute in London. Hilal has been a credit to the group having made great process on the CRUK and ERC grants. She will certainly be missed. We asked her to reflect on her time in the Kawamura Lab, she said: I really enjoyed my time both as a visiting PhD student and then as a postdoctoral researcher at Kawamura group in Oxford and in Newcastle. Fortunately, my path crossed with several talented scientists who work in… Read More »Goodbye Hilal!
A warm welcome to Justina Heslop who joins us to support the group with reporting, events, social media and engagement. Justina has worked as a Research Project Manager at Newcastle University since 2017, supporting several research groups and projects across Chemistry and Engineering most notable the North East Centre for Energy Materials.
A warm welcome to our new PhD students who joined us on 1st October 2021. Emma Wadforth, Oliwia Rebacz, Tom Smith, and Tim Bell will be working across a number of exciting projects funded by BBSRC, EPSRC MoS Med CTD, ERC.
Many congratulations to Dr Benoit Darlot on successfully defending his DPhil thesis on Design of modulatory peptides against chemokines. Benoit was an EPSRC Synthesis for Biology and Medicine CDT student, Oxford and was co-supervised by co-supervised by Prof Shoumo Bhattacharya (Radcliffe Department of Medicine, Oxford). He was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize and continued as a postdoc in the lab for six months. As well as his sterling work on tick protein derived anti-inflammatory peptides, Benoit was an active member of the research community. He was a member of the NU Rainbow Network steering committee and the committee for the NuTEC RSC local section where he endeavoured to support his… Read More »Congratulations Benoit!
A double congratulations is owed to our own Dr Joanna Bonnici, who successfully navigated the perils of a pandemic-Zoom viva to defend her DPhil thesis in December. With hardly a breath to spare she started a family with her husband Tom, as baby Elsie arrived in late January this year. Joanna has been an asset to the lab throughout her DPhil and is almost certainly, definitely, looking forward to more happy years of research to come… Many congratulations to them all and we look forward to using both events as an excuse to over-celebrate later this year once we are all vaccinated!
Paper in Epigenetics: Hypoxia and hypoxia mimetics differentially modulate histone post-translational modifications – Collaborative work with Chris Schofield, Louise Walport, James McCullagh, Richard Hopkinson and Emily Flashman groups where we report the use of LCMS based intact histone assay to look at the global changes in histone PTMs in response to hypoxia / compound treatment – read the full paper here