Jessica, a postdoc with Sandro, has been a close collaborator with the Kwan lab on the antimicrobial development project. Jessica along with EMCRs Karishma and Charlotte from the White and Payne groups have just been awarded $50k to work on our joint project on PNAs. The EMCR grant aims to support research that addresses a major challenge in infectious diseases and to enable up-and-coming researchers to gain leadership experience and establish new cross-disciplinary collaborations. The funding is Jessica’s first successful research grant and has enabled her to embark on a new research topic with our lab to develop novel RNA mimics using PNAs. This award also allowed Jessica to recruit her first DSP (Dalyell Scholar – Talented Student Program) student Rachel. Well done Jessica and all the best with the research. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration.

Ann’s application in the open category with Sandro, Rich and Toby on targeting Nsp9 from the SARS family of virus was also funded.