Institute of Healthy Ageing

20 April 2012

Dr David Gems attended the 2nd International Conference "Genetics of Aging
and Longevity" in Moscow (April 22-25th) where he gave two talks. He
also acted on the Scientific Advisory and
Programme Committee to help organize this interesting meeting, which was
well attended and which helped to foster links between scientists
working on ageing in Russia and the rest of the world. For details see http://aging-genes2012.ru/en/

Our congratulations go to Daniel Pearce who has been awarded a grant of £319,330  from BBSRC for a 3 year project working on 'The effect of calorie restriction on mouse haematopoietic and skeletal muscle stem cells'.  

Congratulations to Dr Helena Cocheme (Partridge Lab) on the publication of her paper entitled 'Using the mitochondria-targeted ratiometric mass spectrometry probe MitoB to measure H(2)O(2) in living Drosophila' in Nature Protocols.

3 April 2012

Our congratulations go to Professor Janet Thornton, Dr Irene Papatheodorou (Partridge Lab) together with Dani Wieser and Matthias Ziehm of EBI, Hinxton.  It has been announced that their paper 'Computational biology for ageing' was amongst the Top 10 downloaded Phil Trans B articles from the Royal Society in 2011.

March 7 - 11 2012

Dr Ekin Bolukbasi (Partridge Lab) attended the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. Ekin writes:

I had the opportunity to attend the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. It was a great meeting featuring plenary talks from famous Drosophilists such as Carl Thummel, Suzanne Eaton and Denise Montell. Furthermore, I was particularly intrigued by the high quality science presented during platform sessions of Drosophila Models of Human Disease as well as Ageing and Physiology, which highlighted once again the power of Drosophila as a model organism to investigate basic biomedical questions affecting human health. This year’s Larry Sandler award went to Stephanie Turner Chen, University of California Riverside for her discovery of Identification of a new class of odorants that are present in the food and are responsible for inhibition of carbon dioxide sensitive neurons in the antennae during. Since related odorants are effective inhibitors of the CO2 response in Culex mosquitoes too, they could potentially be used as very effective mean of disease control transmitted by these mosquitoes.

Dr Matt Piper spent the week commencing 26th March 2012 in Portugal teaching on the PhD programme of the wonderfully named Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.  Entry to the programme is extremely competitive and Matt's topic of "Neurobiology and nutrition' was well received by the students.

7 March 2012

Matt Piper has been awarded a grant of £138,100 for 3 years from the Royal Society to work on: "Characterising the mechanisms underlying lifespan / fecundity trade-offs".

March 2012

"A baby born tonight will live on average five hours longer than a baby born last night. Why and how is life expectancy increasing so quickly? How much of this extended life will be in good health? What do we really understand about the mechanisms of ageing?"

Drs David Gems and Matt Piper will be speaking on this topic at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 15th June.  The festival is held annually as an open to the general public event where over 300 of the world's greatest thinkers, comedians, writers and scientists come together to celebrate and explore all things scientific.

March 2012

The IHA are pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting this year at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition with our exhibit, entitled "How yeast, worms and flies can help us live healthier for longer".

March 2012

Sahar Emran, PhD student in the IHA's Piper lab, has been chosen by UCL's Outreach Office to participate in a programme of taster lectures to be given by PhD students to schoolchildren aged 13 to 18 from schools across London. The aim of the lectures is to introduce the audience to the range of subjects studied at UCL and inspire them to want to study at university.