The idea of the Postdoc buddy scheme is to provide our graduate students an easy means of getting in touch with Postdocs if they have questions about finishing their thesis or life after graduation. It is designed to complement the Graduate Mentor scheme and Peer Support. As recent graduates who have completed the often stressful process of writing up and moving on, Postdocs can offer you some feedback and additional perspective, and even (in some cases) valuable advice on what to do next! An international group with a diverse range of research interests, the Postdocs are keen to get to know you – catch them at Grad Hall, or drop any of them an email.
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Anthony Cullen atc30 Research Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law |
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Jock McOrist jm733 Jock completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and is now a member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics HEP research group. His current research interests are in mathematical and physical aspects of string compactifications and solitons in quantum field theory. |
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Elizabeth Caygill eec33 I did my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and my PhD in Genetics and Development at Columbia University in New York. I’m currently working in the lab of Prof Andrea Brand at the Gurdon Institute. My research uses the Drosophila melanogaster optic lobe as a model to study the roles that microRNAs play in development and differentiation of neural stem cells. |
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Mikhail Spivakov ms853 I studied biology at Moscow University and moved to London in 2002 to do a PhD in developmental epigenetics with Amanda Fisher and Matthias Merkenschlager. Although much of my PhD work was “wet-lab”, I had always been attracted to machine learning and bioinformatics, perhaps because they allow us to see “the bigger picture” (although it sometimes turns out to be quite a blurry one and sometimes merely a mirage). I am currently an “interdisciplinary postdoc” at the EMBL working jointly with Ewan Birney (at the EBI, where I am based most of the time), and with Eileen Furlong (at EMBL’s Heidelberg headquarters). We are using a combination of wet-lab and computational methods to study the logic behind the organisation of developmental enhancers in Drosophila. |
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Dieter Lukas dl384 My undergraduate degree is in Biology from the Universität Münster. For my PhD, I moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to work on population genetics of great apes. I am now interested in understanding the evolution of sociality and cooperation in animals (which actually includes comparing meerkats). |
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Pushmeet Kohli pk320 Pushmeet completed his PhD studies at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Philip H. S. Torr. During his stay at oxford, he was a member of the Visual geometry group at the University of Oxford. His PhD thesis, titled “Minimizing Dynamic and Higher Order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts”, was the winner of the British Machine Vision Association’s Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Award, and was a runner-up for the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. Before joining Microsoft Research Cambridge, Pushmeet was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Bangalore, and had also worked in the Foundation of Software Engineering Group at MSR Redmond. Pushmeet’s papers have appeared in SIGGRAPH, NIPS, ICCV, CVPR, PAMI, IJCV, ICML and ECCV. |
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Anna McKinnon acm94 I am interested in clinical child psychology, in particular the aetiology of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children. I completed both my training to become a clinical psychologist as well as my PhD at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia), during which my research investigated the relationship between children’s memories for their traumatic experiences and the development of PTSD. I am currently working as both a therapist and scientist on the Acute Stress Program for Children and Teenagers (ASPECTS study |
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Moises Garcia-Arencibia mg530 I did my PhD on the effect of cannabinoids on Parkinson’s disease, and I am now working at CIMR on the effect of autophagy in neurodegeneration/neuroprotection |