By Amy Birss ISME is back!!! Every two years the International Society for Microbial Ecology descends on a city, creating a hotspot for the kind of people who get excited about organisms you can't see with the naked eye. This year, that city was Auckland, New Zealand, which, for those of us based in the UK or Singapore, required the kind of long-haul travel that makes you question your life choices somewhere over the Indian Ocean, only to immediately forget all of that the mo

By Isabella Caballero Sierra This summer, I have had the opportunity to join the Pandhal Research Group through the University of Sheffield's SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) programme. SURF provides undergraduate students with an eight-week opportunity to work alongside academics and researchers in their field, develop a research project, and experience what it is like to be part of an active research group. I have been working within Professor Jagroop Pandhal

By Jose Cachay One of the most rewarding experiences during my PhD was attending the International Summer School at IIT Bombay. It had not been part of my original plans, but I had decided to apply, and I am very glad that I did. Looking back, it became much more than an academic course. It was an opportunity to experience a different research environment, meet people from around the world, and gain new perspectives that I can bring into my own research. Mumbai immediately le

Our very own John Howard presented at Pint of Science at the Neepsend Social Club last night with a fantastic talk entitled "The Circle of (Micro)life: Co-operation between microbe could be a powerful tool in pollution remediation & agriculture" Pint of Science is a global event, see all the countries here who got involved between 18th- 20th May! Talk summary: Beside plants and animals, all around us is a hidden world of microbes, even on surfaces or in substances that appear

By Luke Richardson Another year has passed, and just slightly less important than Christmas and Mum’s birthday is the Microbiology Society Annual Conference. This year, myself and José Cachay flew to sunny Belfast to present our findings and hobnob with industry, ECRs, and more senior academics who might have foreknowledge of where jobs might spring up. I presented in the Eukaryotes in Health and the Environment forum while José searched for anyone who’d give him free antibod

Both Ali and Helen had their PhD viva examinations, one day apart. Here's what they had to say about it... Ali The day finally came that I would defend the research I conducted over the coarse of the most difficult years of my life. The adrenaline rush was on high gear early that morning, and feeling more confident than ever that I will do great. Not even the moment I saw my examiners enter the room phased me, it was like I was more ready than ever. What came after was surpr

https://sheffield.ac.uk/cmbe/news/scaling-our-research-over-seven-orders-magnitude

by Luke Richardson after MMEG 2025 Occasionally, the life of an academic does feature some excitement: a conference. Now, I’ll take any opportunity to leave our windowless, underground lab (ironically for an algae lab, we don’t want any stray sunlight getting in and ruining growth experiments) so off we went to Birmingham for the Microbial Molecular Ecology Meeting 2025: MMEG. Sometimes it’s the Swiss Alps, sometimes it’s the Midlands. So it goes. Myself, Prof. Pandhal, and t

by John Howard and Zongting Cai John : Members of the Pandhal Lab recently attended the Molecular Microbial Ecology Group Meeting (MMEG) 2025 at the University of Birmingham to share their own research and see what’s going on in the rest of the UK applied microbiology community. Zongting presented a talk on some of the strategies the lab uses to engineer algal-bacterial consortia for various engineering purpose, while I (John) presented a poster on microfluidic screening te

By Rawirat Pansomsuay My First Month as an Exchange Student in the UK 🌱 The Science Part Hello everyone, and thank you for reading my very first blog! My name is Rawirat Pansomsuay, and I am a second-year PhD student from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Thailand. My supervisor in Thailand is Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cherdsak Maneeruttanarungroj, who has supported and guided me throughout my research journey. I feel incredibly lucky to have the opportun

John Howard The science part I’ve just got back from visiting Prof Nina Lin’s lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I have no...

Jags Pandhal I was really lucky to participate in my first EIT sponsored "algae school" last week in Iceland. The event was organised...

AlgalBBB Conference in Pheonix Arizona Several of us attended the International Conference of Algal Biomass, Biofuels and Bioproducts,...

Jags Pandhal Mixtures of algal biomass, PHA's etc. Good times were had visiting the Warwick Manufacturing Group site as part of our EPSRC...

Helen Wright For the final stage of my PhD experimental work I packed up my last samples and headed down to Ludger Ltd in Oxfordshire for...

We welcome our new postdoc, Dr. John Howard, to the team. John recently completed a postdoc at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine...

Amy Birss In January, I moved to Singapore to join the Nagarajan lab at the A* Genome Institute in Singapore, with the A* Research...

Jose Cachay On March 28th, I had the opportunity to visit AlgaeCytes as part of a PhycoClub BBSRC funded visit, and it was an...

This year's Annual Microbiology Society conference took place in Liverpool over 4 days. We had four of us in attendance at the event,...

Had an excellent time attending this symposium last week. It focussed on health, nutrition and medical applications from algae. We hard...