Student Profiles

Greetings! My name is Krishna, and I am a third year student at the University of Sheffield. My PhD project involves the mechanistics of how viruses known as bacteriophages interact with the cell surface of Enterococcal bacteria. These bacteriophages specifically target bacteria living in the digestive systems of humans and animals.  We particularly focus on how these viruses use a complex sugar structure on the bacterial surface called Enterococcal Polysaccharide Antigen (EP

My project at the University of Newcastle researches Rheumatoid Arthritis and how we can monitor the immune response over the course of treatment. I have been involved in conducting a clinical trial for a type of therapy called ‘cellular dendritic cell therapy’ which aims to make the immune system more tolerant of its own peptides and reduce the inflammatory response - a kind of autoimmune immunisation. As a treatment it is currently still in the research and clinical trial p

I'm Kirsty, a second year PhD student at Newcastle University. My project is focused on creating drugs that are able to inhibit the Complement system (part of the body's immune system). Complement has been implicated in a range of diseases and my interest is in its role in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. Neuroinflammation in these diseases can be harmful rather than protective as the immune system is overactivated and damages the body's own cells. I

I’m Diyanath, I’m a final year student at the University of Newcastle.   My project combines cancer biology and genomics with bioinformatics and data science to investigate the genetic associations of Acute Myeloid Leukemia and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. I use large clinical and genomic datasets to examine how genomic variants (changes in DNA) are linked to disease risk and progression in patients with these blood cancers. Developing tools to predict how early-stage chroni

I’m Esme and I’m a third year student at the University of York.  All cells in the human body are coated in a layer of sugar molecules. These sugars are important indicators of ‘self’ to the immune system so it can identify ‘normal’ cells. However, cancer cells are often covered in these sugar ‘self’ signals, allowing them to hide from the immune system. My work is interested in exploiting this. To do this, I use genetic manipulation to trick cancer cells into coating themsel