Professor Graham Anderson discusses his research.
Duration: 3.51 mins
Speakers
S1 Professor Graham Anderson, Professor of T-Lymphocyte Biology
Transcript
The great thing about research is you can make the best plans in the world and they can change in the space of five minutes with a new piece of data or a new experiment and I think that for me is the real excitement. That’s the drive and what I like to do is get the idea that, you know, PhD students coming into the lab and postdocs coming into the lab get that buzz as well, you know, you get bitten by that enthusiasm.
Over the past sort of ten years or so I’ve had around about twelve PhD students in the lab and they’ve all gone on to various different aspects of science really. So one or two of them moved away from academic research and went into teaching – teaching Biology A-level. Some of them went on to do postdoc research within the UK. One or two of them moved on to the US, so I’ve an old student of mine who’s currently at Yale University doing a postdoc there and other ones have gone on to places like Philadelphia and New York. One of my other PhD students actually moved away again from research and now works for the Wellcome Trust as a grants advisor. So quite a sort of diverse range of things but all still relatively close to biomedical research.
One of the great things about science is it’s a fantastic opportunity to travel and interact with people you wouldn’t normally get access to and so to bring in people from various different parts of the world into Birmingham creates such a diversity and such an excitement in terms of new ideas and new techniques and that’s really been something that we’ve really enjoyed when we’ve had international visitors and international students. I’m fortunate enough to have a visiting professorship to the University of Tokushima in Japan and that’s allowed us to bring in, as a short term, students from Japan and some of my students have gone over to Japan as well on reciprocal visits, training visits. So that’s added some kind of excitement because everybody comes from different cultural backgrounds and the labs actually enjoyed interacting with those people as well.
We have a new link now with a lab in Israel, the [Weisman - 0:02:14] Institute and we have funding now from Israel which allows us to do reciprocal visits between Birmingham and Israel, so we can send our students over there for short periods to learn techniques that are new in the Israeli lab, and vice versa. So there are plenty of opportunities to meet people and meet their peers and meet world leaders in their field really and that helps them in their own career track. So at the minute we actually have a PhD student from South Korea; she’s been with us for probably just over three years now and that was exciting for us because typically many of our students come from the UK but to be able to bring in students from overseas was exciting because it brings in the diversity to the lab and different people working in different ways has been good. So she actually has her PhD viva later on this week so she’ll finish her PhD studies with us then and then the idea is for her to carry on a research project for us for a time in the lab.
What I’d like to be able to do is to continue making Birmingham a big success in immunology. It’s had an enormous track record of success in studying the immune system in Birmingham and you know, the way plans are going now for the future, I think it’s still an exciting time to kind of keep both basic and applied research at the forefront in Birmingham and I’m very excited about the opportunities that are developing with that.
END OF RECORDING