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