Coronavirus nanoscience: the tiny technologies tackling a global pandemic

Posted on 9 October 2020 by doctoral-academy-blog

Josh Davies, School of Chemistry The world-altering coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic is thought to be just 60 nanometres to 120 nanometres in size. This is so mind bogglingly small that you could fit more than 400 of these virus particles into the width of a single hair on your head. In fact, coronaviruses are so small
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Social distancing is making public transport worse for the environment than cars – here’s how to fix it

Posted on 16 September 2020 by doctoral-academy-blog

Thomas Woolley, Lecturer at School of Mathematics, and Joshua Moore, Lucy Henley, and Timothy Ostler, PhD students at School of Mathematics. During lockdown, travel restrictions caused car and public transport use to plummet across the UK. On April 12 2020, the number of daily trips by car fell to 22%, compared to a typical day
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Four ways people stuck at home became armchair naturalists during lockdown

Posted on 19 August 2020 by doctoral-academy-blog

Rebecca Young and Jordan Patrick Cuff, School of Biosciences Who could have imagined that being confined to our homes would bring so many people closer to nature? With one-third of the world under lockdown at one point, a record number of people pitched in to help citizen science projects gather information about the natural world.
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The importance of public engagement (and how you can get involved!)

Posted on 25 February 2020 by doctoral-academy-blog

Public engagement is an important part of being a PhD student, helping you to communicate your research to a diverse range of audiences. Here, Amy Smith from CITER (Cardiff Institute for Tissue Engineering and Repair) tells us how PhD students can get involved with the CITER portfolio of scientific interactive outreach activities and enthuse the next generation!
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Pancreatic cancer wouldn’t be so deadly if we could just diagnose it earlier

Posted on 20 November 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

William Hill, School of Biosciences Pancreatic cancer is extremely difficult to diagnose. The current prognosis for pancreatic cancer is so poor that a UK cancer charity has warned more than 11,000 people are expected to die from the cancer by 2026, and that it will overtake breast cancer to become the fourth-biggest cancer killer. Even
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How can we personalise treatments for patients with breast cancer?

Posted on 23 October 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here, Zoe Hudson from School of Medicine shares her research into the personalisation of breast cancer treatments. Cancer is not just one disease and nor is breast cancer. Different cells in the breast can divide in an uncontrolled way and the tumours those cells produce develop lots of different
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Looking beyond the horizon for new vaccine strategies against HIV-1 infection

Posted on 27 August 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

James Wheeldon, School of Medicine HIV/AIDS remains a global threat affecting 37.9 million In the developed world, HIV/AIDS is now effectively managed, to the point where patients who adhere to highly-active combined anti-retroviral therapy can live near-normal life expectancies. Nevertheless, Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1 (HIV-1) still remains a significant threat to life in many parts
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22q11.2 deletion: the most common syndrome you have never heard of

Posted on 4 June 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

Natali_Mis/www.shutterstock.com Hayley Moulding, School of Medicine You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that 22q11.2 was a postcode or password. My guess is you wouldn’t have thought it was the most prevalent syndrome of its kind. So let’s talk about “22q”. Everyone has 23 pairs of chromosomes – that’s 46 all together. Chromosomes are made of
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Helping to rebuild lives after stroke

Posted on 7 May 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

Last week saw the launch of the Stroke Association’s annual stroke awareness month, Make May Purple. Here, Alex Smith from the School of Medicine tells us how he aims to improve the ways in which stroke survivors can share their experiences and outcomes. A few weeks ago the Stroke Association unveiled its first ever TV
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Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis: my journey to finding a a new treatment

Posted on 9 April 2019 by doctoral-academy-blog

In the first of our blog series on rare diseases, Kasope Wolffs, School of Biosciences, tells us how her research into idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis could change the lives of millions of sufferers worldwide. Did you know that fibrosis is responsible for almost half of all deaths? If you’re thinking “that can’t be right”, you’re not
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