Fantastic talks across medical students, NHS staff and PhD students. Nice chats with people about their work and wider microbiology. Getting a bit of championing the @microbiologysociety.org in aswell #microbiochamps.
Also great see the old haunt in its new form, still as windy as it ever was!

Following up with last weeks adventures, Wednesday was a trip on the new metro through to Sunderland for a job fair and then the AMR awareness symposia run by the University of Sunderland School of Medicine.

Second talk was from another of M3031's finest, Finn Brady from @jmarlesw.bsky.social lab
working on the general stressosome 🫡
Lovely to see how this story is moving along!

Busy week last week kicked off with another billy belter of a seminar from @mhd-newcastle.bsky.social
First talk from James Haycocks from @banzhaflab.bsky.social
with some cool work with chemical genomics on Vibrio. It's great seeing the high throughput plates in action. #dreamtheme

Second talk was from Prof. Frank Sargent with an interesting talk on TXSS. Another set of brilliant talks from the #dreamtheme, with plenty of further reading, thanks to speakers, @dave-bolam.bsky.social chairing and the other organisers from the theme!

Great to attend @mhd-newcastle.bsky.social seminar series yday, 1st talk from Kathleen of @jmarlesw.bsky.social lab with a brilliant Structural Biology 101 from an ÄKTA aficionado for the angstrom averse, to explain the structure discovery pipeline and what’s making structural biologists so sad.

Apple and date slice. Yes. Please. 10/10. Moist filling but a firm base. Crumble on the top. I think that’s pushed the lemon drizzle to the side. It’s certainly outcompeted the NCL carrot cake that’s for sure. It’s been a week, I’m still thinking about it. It’s good stuff don’t miss out.

Three cakes on offer at Manchester.
Pink lemonade cake. 7/10. Had two slices one very good, one a bit dry. Averaged the two. Not troubling NCL lemon drizzle. Pink dragonfruit cake. 6/10. Rich icing, but cake itself fell short. It was good but room for improvement.

We also had great speakers in Anders Aufderhorst-Roberts from Durham and Liverpool and Mark Leake from @physicsoflifeuk.bsky.social discussing experiences and opportunities of interdisciplinary collaboration. Loads to think about from this session and already signposted two people towards PoLNET!

The afternoon focused on interdisciplinary collaboration. Strengthening your networking and how best to sell your expertise and what you need to be a good collaborator. ‘The best research you can do is talk to people!’ was a the first important step to opening collaboration.

Lunch was paired with networking time chatting about our backgrounds, current research and how good this apple and date slice was. Lots of microbiologists in the house, coming from institutes all over the country.

The morning session looked at mentoring, career planning and goal setting. Invited speakers were @claudiabonfio.bsky.social , James Duce and @kamarameenali.bsky.social shared career paths from more linear to a vine network between NHS, academia, industry and independent organisations.

This time last week I had a brilliant time at the Early Career Symposium. after a lovely amble from the station to The Core @manchester.ac.uk it was pretty much registration time complete with coffee and pink lemonade cake. More on that later.

Early start this morning for @biochemsoc.bsky.social Early Career Symposium in 0161 exploring collaboration, mentorship and networking 🐝 #BiochemEvent
Exciting few days in the North West to come!

Thank you to @proftracypalmer.bsky.social for providing the chocolate cake and apricot roll (eaten before photo taken) which more than held their own against the Lemon drizzle cake (the jewel in the crown of NCL catering )

Kicking off my Bluesky #content with a view from the train window on my way to @amiposts.bsky.social early career meeting in Liverpool #LAM_ECS2025
Looking forward to a busy day of microbiology 🧫🔬