Author: Graduate School

MRC-LMS PhD Workshop & Careers Forum at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Square

The second annual Medical Research Council (MRC) London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) PhD Student Retreat took place on Friday 25 May 2018. Held at the iconic Wellcome Collection in Euston Square, this event offered PhD students from all year groups the chance to engage and socialise with students from outside of their immediate research section.

Building on the success of the inaugural 2017 retreat held at Kew Gardens, this year’s event had a renewed focus on ‘Career Development and Networking’; prompting students to start considering what future avenues they may wish to explore upon completion of their PhD studies.

In this vein, the day began with a Networking Workshop delivered by Katie Dallison from the Imperial Careers Service, which provides students with free help and advice regarding career advancement, like CV checks and interview preparation. Katie highlighted the importance of making connections in all types of professional events, and shared tips to reduce pre-networking anxiety. During the workshop, students also had the opportunity to practice and refine their “elevator pitches”, get further ideas of recruitment processes, and recognise uses and downfalls of social media.

The students had the ability to use these newly acquired skills in the PhD student poster presentations, facilitating discussion based on current research that PhD students are carrying out at the LMS. The topics ranged from patient-derived neurons to study Down syndrome, to 3D genome architecture and gene regulation, to the evolution of transposable elements. Particularly outstanding posters were acknowledged by the Poster Awards, where this year, the first place was awarded to Helen Paterson for her poster entitled ‘The role of splicing factors in metabolic health and disease’, followed in close succession by Toni Beltran and Holly Simpson Ragdale, in 2nd and 3rd place respectively.

This also gave time for students to visit the vast collection of medical based artefacts from all over the world, collected at the Wellcome Collection. Especially noteworthy in the collection, is the presence of all volumes of the printed version of the first sequenced human genome.

The unanimous highlight of the day however, was an afternoon careers panel which brought together a unique collection of individuals who have gone on to follow a range of post-PhD career paths. The panellists represented diverse fields, including the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, scientific editing, management consulting and patent law industries. Chaired by our own Social Representative, Matt Newton, the panel discussion allowed the speakers to share with us industry-specific insights, whilst also being open to discuss the factors that helped shape and influence their decisions at key moments of their respective careers.  We would like to send a huge thank you to the following individuals for sharing their time and knowledge with us all!

Following the panel, the students received a talk from the day’s keynote speaker, Professor Steve Jackson, who is currently a senior group leader at The Gurdon Institute (University of Cambridge), and fellow of the Royal Society. His talk entitled “Cellular responses to DNA damage: mechanistic insights and applications in cancer therapy” illuminated how basic molecular understanding of cellular processes can be translated into clinical applications, and how he was able to follow the success journey of a drug from the lab bench to the patients in clinic.

The day culminated with a networking reception, where students had the opportunity to continue discussions with panelists and speakers from throughout the day. All in all the day was a triumph for the LMS Student Committee, who put together this event, and we very much look forward to the 2019 Student Retreat!

Finally we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge generous funding from both the Imperial College Graduate School and Medical Research Council.

How interventions are spread: Winning second prize at the Research as Art Summer Showcase

By Sophie Spitters, PhD Student, Department of Medicine

The Imperial College London Graduate School organised their annual Summer Showcase on Friday July 13th. The showcase aims to celebrate research undertaken by PhD students at Imperial and invites staff, students and visitors to find out more about their work via a poster and a research as art exhibition. I joined the research as art exhibition, showcasing my NIHR CLAHRC NWL research, and won second prize! First prize was won by Iman Ibrahim, who demonstrated what it takes to get clean drinking water to our taps in her mandala called ‘the ripple effect’. And third prize was won by Laura Braun for her ‘sludge cake’ made from sewage, demonstrating the value of faecal waste treatment in order to return it safely to the environment as a natural fertiliser.

 

How interventions are spread

My art installation, titled ‘How interventions are spread’, aimed to communicate the reality of spreading healthcare improvement interventions, which often does not follow the expected trajectory. Healthcare improvement is often depicted as a linear straightforward process. First, a problem is identified. Then, a potential solution or intervention gets implemented in one area. Finally, if that intervention has shown to be successful, it is spread to other areas. The aim of spread in this context is to replicate the successful intervention exactly as is. Big investments are made to demonstrate that positive outcomes are linked to a particular intervention. So why change a winning formula? Why change an evidence-based intervention?

My research shows how in reality, the process of spread is a lot more complex. Evidence-based interventions often get presented as nicely packaged products with a clear step-by-step manual, not reflecting the messiness of interpersonal relationships, hard work and contextual dependencies underpinning its development. Hence, interventions do not just get picked up in one place and dropped off in another. When spreading to other areas, interventions change and develop depending on local priorities, capabilities and resources. This work is based on the spread of an allergy service improvement initiative.

I tried to communicate these issues through my art installation via two components: the video below and an interactive element encouraging people to build their own intervention with the (flawed) information and materials provided in the black box.

 

Exhibiting at the Summer Showcase

Joining the research as art competition was a great opportunity for me to communicate one of my research findings in a creative way. During the creation of the project, I realised that replicating a simple playdoh sculpture (which I used as a visual analogy) had many subtleties in common with replicating interventions in real-life quality improvement efforts. I never actually expected to see that. The Summer Showcase gave me the chance to explore these similarities and differences further with the visitors. It was great talking to people from different disciplines and different backgrounds about my research and to hear about their thoughts and insights. The art installation proved to be a great vehicle to start discussion, explore connections with people’s own experiences, and to visually demonstrate a key take home message from my research.

“Dream Today, Do Tomorrow”: Reflections from a cross-cultural, climate change-themed summer in Beijing

By Shiladitya Ghosh, 2nd Year PhD Student, Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London

In the modern day, students (especially PhD students) tend to have a crippling fear of committing to future plans because – “what if I end up needing those extra days to finish this report or do repeats for my experiments?” As the 2018 edition of the Imperial – Tsinghua Global Fellows Programme (GFP) on Climate Change and Energy drew near, I too had misgivings. Who was going to write my reports for me?!

However, a change in setting and scenery helps to calm and settle the mind – and I experienced this upon landing in Beijing in the sweltering 36°C early morning sun. Meeting other participants reassured me that we would have an enjoyable and meaningful time one way or another, away from the otherwise-incessant worries of our degrees. In fact, it turns out that several of the Imperial students were still writing their ESA (first year assessment) reports! And I thought I had problems…

When it came down to it, those 5 days completely flew by. As we formed inter-university teams and took part in various tasks, the time spent on learning to effectively communicate while also attempting to work towards common goals took up more and more of our waking moments – even infringing upon mealtimes, as we sought the cooperation of our Tsinghua colleagues in helping us identify the various sumptuous dishes on offer. In return, we also invited our counterparts to join our evening board games crusades, watching the World Cup finals late at night (it came home a little too early…), and even yoga sessions!

Considering that the aims of the programme include facilitating cultural exchange and fostering collaboration, you realise how much of that takes place (and needs to take place) outside of the official programme just as described above. Just like in a professional collaboration, everyone involved will only get the most out of it if they first take the time to understand and connect with the other parties. The actual (technical) work of the collaborative project may only be half the job – the personal connection and groundwork is the other, bigger half!

Without revealing the specifics of the course, I can confirm that there were ample opportunities for mental stimulation whether in finding ways to collaboratively tackle specific issues pertaining to climate change or global energy demands, or through introspection to understand more about themselves, what their personal strengths are and what soft skills they still can develop in. Sure, maybe not every team completed every task, but it was never about that. A line from a poem penned and presented on the final day perhaps sums up both this programme and our own PhD experiences: “It’s about the journey, not the win.”

No single activity felt like a self-contained episode; every session was connected to past and future activities. We learnt about how we function as individuals and how we can best play a role in any team we may work together in. These are very important professional capabilities that I can recommend to any graduate student to consider inculcating in themselves – unsurprisingly perhaps the reason why a GFP course is allowed to fill up the Graduate School course requirements for Imperial students prior to their ESA/LSR/final submission.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this programme for all of us as individual specialists in our own particular fields was that it opened our eyes and minds to the potential of every discipline to play a significant part in a concerted effort to tackle climate change. My accelerated project team (水星 or shuǐ xīng; Water from the Stars) and cultural exchange team (Imperial Dragons) consisted of members with backgrounds in fluid hydraulics, meteorology, energy storage, membrane technologies, art and systems design, signals monitoring, and cancerology (medicine).

I’d never have expected students in most of those areas to have much of a professional interest in, or even having a way to meaningfully contribute towards, solving the world’s biggest problem lying ahead – but by the end of the week, I had never been happier to have been so wrong in my life.

To everyone reading: thank you for your time reading this. For each person that makes it to this page, that’s one more person that has at least the slightest interest and curiosity about playing a part in tackling climate change. And from what I’ve learnt this summer – no matter what your academic background is, we want and need every single one of you onboard!

Imperial College squad!
Panel discussion
Boat trip
Finale!
Finals!