As we passed the midpoint of Michaelmas term, it was time for a very special edition of Tuesday Talks: our Student Takeover (or ‘The best one!’ as I had been told at almost every single session I’ve attended this term).
After a brief welcome from Professor Lord Tarassenko, Johannes Vöhler (GCR VP for Academic Matters) took over to guide us. Instead of a longer guest talk, we were looking forward to five short student talks on their very own research projects.
Talks and Topics
Kat Degtiareva
First, Kat explained her research on how our gut microbiome affects our health. With well-designed visuals, she spoke about the microbiome’s importance in supporting digestion, immune function, and gut-brain signalling. Illustrated by studies on obese and depressed laboratory mice, Kat humorously showed the microbiome’s large impact. We were surprised to hear that this topic is only now being investigated in population-wide studies, an area she is exploring using machine learning. To wrap up, she gave us practical recommendations on how to care for our microbiome next time we grab a Reuben lunch.
Isabella Savin
Next came Isabella, who described her work on new ways to see how DNA is organised. She reminded us that DNA’s structure is far more complicated than a pile of spaghetti and that understanding how it’s organised is key to understanding how cells work. She showed two ways to do this: using a very powerful (and expensive) microscope, or expansion microscopy (ExM). This is where cells are placed in gel and made bigger with water. Whilst Isabella joked that people at the back might not see the DNA dots on her slides, the combined images were very detailed.
Kristijonas Raibuzis
Kristijonas concluded the pre-dinner talks by discussing how oxygen levels affect how coronaviruses behave. His research explores why they stop replicating in low-oxygen conditions, and how there are many factors influencing this. At the end, he reminded us that coronaviruses want to be common cold viruses rather than pathogenic. But, either way, I think we can agree that we don’t want to catch them.
Joseph Miller
After dinner, Joseph Miller spoke about the challenges of making AI safe. His work with “PauseAI” even led him to contact Professor Lord Tarassenko, only to learn through his reply he was the President of the College he was about to join at the start of his DPhil. Joseph explained with it’s so difficult to understand how AI systems think and shared recent examples of big tech companies struggling to control their models. As there’s only one shot at creating such super-human models with our human values, Joseph argued that we need to make AI safer before making it smarter.
Eliza Rayner
Finally, Eliza ended the evening with a talk on how to use electricity to help fight antibiotic resistance. She discussed the unnecessary use of antibiotics and the implied danger of bacteria becoming resistant. Doctors use broad antibiotics because evaluating which targeted drugs will work takes several days. Her work in a summer internship helped Eliza elaborate a new approach using electrical fingerprints of cells. This can reduce the time needed for analysis from a few days to just a few hours. Some good news to end the talks and lead into dessert!
