We had a lovely Pirog/Briggs barbecue last week. It is so nice to be able to sit outside, play croquet and chat about life. A big thank you to Prof Mike Briggs for inviting us to his lovely Northumberland home!

In June the NC3Rs welcomed twenty of their PhD students to London for the annual summer school, which included peer networking, a flash poster session and some further useful online sessions. Here’s a picture of all the students, with our own Marc Farcasanu in the front row.

Explore Lifelong Learning have kindly invited us and our colleagues (Shoba Amarnath, Kasia Pirog, @GrainOfScience, @jorisveltman and @linda_lako) from Newcastle University to talk about our work as part of their summer programme. Save the date and see what we’ve been up to! @nubiosciences

Our Black Box project (https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/blackbox/) will be featured at the Edinburgh Science Festival on Saturday the 9th of April and will screen until the 9th of June. Come say hi if you’re in Edinburgh this weekend, we will be hosting an opening talk at 2pm.

The full program of our Edinburgh show can be found here: https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/mediaLibrary/other/english/58530.pdf

Being a scientist is not only about the work, results and publications, but also about forging links and networks, and long lasting friendships that can help in these discoveries in the future. We had a lovely day out in Corbridge yesterday with our students and joint with the Briggs lab. Spring is definitely here!

A lovely lab Christmas lunch this week, joint with Mike Briggs’s lab. It’s so nice to be able to celebrate together again. Thank you all for a great year despite the difficulties! Here’s to another year of great science!

Great festive fun, and a big thank you to Mike for writing it!

We had a lovely socially distanced evening at the”Ignite” installation at Gibside to celebrate (the end of) 2020 and for some Christmas cheer. Merry Christmas everyone!

Well done Thais! An online viva and a Zoom celebration for now, but we will have a proper one for your graduation for sure!

A big thank you to the examiners, Dr Emma Blain and Dr Ana Ferreira-Duarte, for conducting the viva. Thank you to JGW Patterson Foundation for funding this exciting project in tissue engineering of cartilage.

Congratulations from a very proud supervisor!