Centre Student Showcase
The Centre for Stem Cell Systems held their second Student Showcase early this month, giving students an opportunity to explain their research to a diverse audience and to practise their public speaking skills.
The Centre for Stem Cell Systems held their second Student Showcase early this month.
These showcases are an quarterly initiative for students to share their work the broader audience of researchers involved in the Centre, and for the Centre to celebrate the importance of their contribution towards the goals of the network.
The Student Showcases give Honours, Masters, PhD, and short project students the opportunity to explain their research to a diverse audience and to practise their public speaking skills.
The three speakers represented a diverse range of research topics:
Cristiana Mattei – In Vitro Modeling of Human Neurogenesis: The Generation of Inner Ear Organoids Enriched with Mechanosensitive Vestibular Hair Cells
Cristiana is in her third PhD year at the University of Melbourne. Under the supervision of Associate Professor Bryony Nayagam and Associate Professor Mirella Dottori, Cristiana is aiming to model human neurogenesis in physiological and pathological conditions by developing a suitable in vitro 3D culture system using human pluripotent stem cells. Cristiana showcased the success she has achieved in growing inner-ear organoids, and identified areas of research that she is interested in tackling later in her career.
Luxin Wang - Data Mining in the Ensembl Upgrade Project
Luxin completed an internship with Stemformatics as part of her Masters of Software Engineering. Luxin and the wider Stemformatics team are building a web-based tool for visualizing human and mouse data through mapping the genes, as well as the changes between versions of different Ensembl database versions. Luxin presented her work on “Data Mining in the Ensembl Upgrade Project”, where she highlighted the challenges of standardising and comparing complex data.
Yongcheng Jin – The comparison and discovery of criteria to identifying microglia, and the recurrence of differentiating microglia cells from human iPSCs
Yongcheng has just commenced his honours year within the laboratory of Christine Wells. For his Honours project, he is planning to use a data mining approach to identify genes that discriminate between microglia and macrophage. These gene signatures will then be utilised to help define the process of differentiation between macrophages and microglia in vitro.
The Centre for Stem Cell Systems is dedicated to training the next generation of stem cell researchers, and opportunities to develop professional skills.
If you are a supervisor with a student, or are a student who would be interested in being involved, please contact us.