Posts Tagged ‘ scientist ’

Happy International Women’s Day 2012!

March 8, 2012
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Happy International Women’s Day 2012!

“Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn’t.”  Gertrude B. Elion, Nobel Laureate 1988. A few days ago, Prof Alice Roberts, the first Professor of Public Engagement, tweeted about the still shockingly low number of female professors in science. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for the low numbers of female scientists in academia. The first one is linked to inspiring girls and female...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr Geraint Parry

February 28, 2012
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gerraint

I met Geraint Parry on Twitter, where he tweets under @LiverpoolPlants about his research. Fortunately, my colleagues were able to confirm that he indeed is real and a plant cell biologist studying the nuclear pore complex. He also scored 6 out of 10 points from the “10 signs you might be a plant biologist” post, plus I awarded him two more points for having a picture of Arabidopsis thaliana as avatar. All evidence combined, Geraint immediately qualified as today’s Face of Plant Cell Biology – thanks for taking part, Geraint! :-)) Please check out Geraint’s website for more information and...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr Nathalie Leborgne-Castel

February 21, 2012
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Nathalie LC

This post is part of the series “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”. In this series I am posting answers of plant cell biologists at all stages of their career to a set of five questions. If you are a plant cell biologist and would like to complete my questionnaire, please email me at anne@plantcellbiology.com. Seriously, please do – I am slowly but surely running out of colleagues to pester!  Today’s Face of Plant Cell Biology is Dr Nathalie Leborgne-Castel from the Université de Bourgogne in France. Nathalie was kind enough to allow us to use her fantastic tomography and plasmolysis...

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10 signs you might be a plant scientist

February 19, 2012
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10 signs you might be a plant scientist

How many of these sound familiar? 1)   When you open a new review about a conserved eukaryotic protein family, you first perform a whole document search for “plant” and “arabidopsis”. 2)   People assume that you know the name of every plant and ask for your advice on growing vegetables. 3)   You have looked at Monstera leaves and wondered if you could use these for your expression experiments. 4)   You had a brown thumb before you were forced to care for your own plants for your experiments. 5)   When you are in a restaurant, you automatically check if the table...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr John Runions

February 15, 2012
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John Runions

John Runions is a little bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – only that his two identities both have a Dr title. Most of his time he spends working, teaching and playing with the microscopes at Oxford Brookes University. But when nobody is watching, he puts on his cape of knowledge, takes his sword of science enthusiasm and leaps on air as “Dr Molecule” for BBC Radio Oxford. John’s website is like a little treasure chest, full with microscopy images and movies. You can even watch one of his presentations from the last GARNet meeting 2011 on YouTube...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr Petra Boevink

February 7, 2012
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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr Petra Boevink

If someone asked me about the three most important papers which my research is based on, I might have to think for a minute or so about two of them. But my choice for the third one (or first one, if you wish) would be very clear: “Boevink et al. 1998!”   Petra Boevink, Karl Oparka, Simon Santa Cruz, Barry Martin, Alan Betteridge, Chris Hawes (1998). “Stacks on tracks: the plant Golgi apparatus travels on an actin/ER network”. Plant Journal 15(3): 441-447.               In this study the researchers linked green fluorescent protein (GFP)...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr David C Logan

January 31, 2012
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logan

I will never forget the first time I met David Logan at the Botanical Microscopy Meeting in Salzburg in 2007. It was the first international conference that I attended as PhD student, and I  had to give a talk about my research. The lecture theatre was much larger than we all had thought and there was a microphone on a stand. David was talking just after me. He went to the mic, tapped it and said: “I feel like a rock star. – HELLO SALZBURG!” The reason that this made such an impression on me was because it was...

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Hello. I am a regular person!

January 29, 2012
By
drawing1

This morning I stumbled across this delightful website (via Esther Wojcicki): “Drawings of Scientists“. For this project, 7th graders prepared drawings of scientists together with a description of how they imagined a scientist to be like. Then they visited FermiLab where they got the chance to meet and talk to “real” scientists. After that, they put their thoughts on paper to produce a “before” and “after” image series. Seeing these drawings did not only make me laugh but also made me happy. It was great to see how the childrens’ perception of scientists changed from a man with glasses...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison

January 24, 2012
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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison

Welcome to today’s installment of “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”! When I sent my five questions to Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison from the University of Leicester, I got something completely unexpected and utterly brilliant back: A full video interview in a virtual studio with its own talk show host! I immensely enjoyed watching Pat talking about his research and his advice for students and I hope that you will too. To me, this is the perfect example of how blogs and social media can be used in a fun and effective way to bring your science to a wider audience....

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Dr Kentaro Tamura

January 17, 2012
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Tamura

This post is part of the new series “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”. In this series I am going to post answers of plant cell biologists at all stages of their career to a set of five questions. For obvious reasons I expect this to at first feature researchers which I know quite well, simply because I hope that they will be more willing to complete the questionnaire! However, by no means this should indicate an order of importance and I am very keen to feature as many researchers as possible. If you are a plant cell biologist and...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Prof Chris Hawes

January 10, 2012
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Prof Chris Hawes

For the new year I have started a new series called “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”. In this series I am going to post answers of plant cell biologists at all stages of their career to a set of five questions. For obvious reasons I expect this to at first feature researchers which I know quite well, simply because I hope that they will be more willing to complete the questionnaire! However, by no means this should indicate an order of importance and I am very keen to feature as many researchers as possible. If you are a plant...

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Charlotte Carroll

January 3, 2012
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Charlotte

First of all, I would like to wish you a happy, healthy and successful new year 2012! When I was pondering about blog topics for 2012 I thought that it would be nice to publish short profiles of plant cell biologists. With this I am hoping to put faces to the general term often heard in media, “scientists have found out that…”, and show that scientists are not at all like the stereotypical eccentric mad professor in a white lab coat – well, 99% aren’t! Hopefully it will also make you realise that the information you find in text...

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