Bringing minds together
Since its inauguration in 2014, our Researcher Mobility Grant scheme has helped more than 100 early career researchers and postgraduate students with their research.
Their visits have allowed them to develop long lasting collaborations on key scientific challenges, learn new skills that they have brought back to their own lab and take advantage of equipment and techniques not available at home.
Ultimate frisbee
Hannah Bolt is a PhD student at the University of Durham, who works on peptoids (a class of biomimetic compounds) in Steven Cobb and Paul Denny’s labs. She visited Ronald Zuckerman, the inventor of peptoids, at the Molecular Foundry in the US. The Molecular Foundry is a user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that makes nanoscience tools available to the worldwide scientific community.
"The Molecular Foundry has a User Programme, which allows academic groups from around the world to submit proposals to use the facilities and interact with the Zuckermann lab," explains Hannah. "We were awarded a User Programme grant by the Molecular Foundry and the Royal Society of Chemistry Researcher Mobility Grant helped us to cover accommodation and travel costs."
“It was an ideal case: [Hannah and her supervisors] are experts in microbial biology, and had some very well-developed hypotheses about which types of peptoid oligomers would exhibit antimicrobial activity,” says Ronald.
Whilst there, Hannah took advantage of the state-of-the-art peptoid synthesisers to make 60 compounds in six weeks – something that would have taken months in Durham – before taking them back to study their biology.
"[Hannah] gave group meetings on her work, discussed her science regularly with numerous colleagues, and presented a poster on her work at the 9th Peptoid Summit," said Ronald on Hannah’s contributions at the Foundry. "Prof. Cobb gave a talk on their work also at the Summit. They helped bring their unique and exciting area of biological science to the Foundry community, which is otherwise focused on energy research."
Since her visit, Hannah and her supervisors have worked with Ronald on their first paper based on this work. She is now investigating results from the biological evaluation of the peptoids she made.
"The work we accomplished is beginning to reveal design principles for developing effective anti-parasitic drugs," explains Ronald, "This is pointing the way toward developing more advanced optimised compounds. I look forward to continue the collaboration to explore the synthesis of new, more effective compounds, and/or the scale-up to produce large enough quantities of compounds to enable in vivo studies."
However, it wasn’t all work and no play. Hannah made the most of her visit in other ways too.
"I found out that most peptoid researchers are excellent at ultimate frisbee, something I think that Ron has had a hand in encouraging," she recalls. Perhaps most importantly, though, her trip helped her make decisions about her future.
"The opportunity to visit an internationally leading laboratory also allowed me to network with other academic groups and has confirmed my ambitions to pursue a postdoctoral research position in the USA after the end of my PhD project."
Collaborations crossing continents
Our Researcher Mobility Grants also help those later in their career. Julio Cezar Pastre is an Assistant Professor at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, who develops new methodologies for synthesising drug candidates. He visited our past president Professor Steven Ley in Cambridge, UK, for two months. In that time, Julio took advantage of the flow chemistry techniques developed in Ley’s world-leading lab to investigate the large-scale preparation of the natural product goniothalamin and its derivatives for anticancer agents.
"We decided that the synthesis of goniothalamin under continuous flow conditions could be interesting, having in mind that in vivo assays usually require a large quantity of materials,” Julio says. “An automated synthesis of goniothalamin would speed up its synthesis and allow the preparation of goniothalamin on demand."
Julio is now preparing two manuscripts for publication based on the work he did on his visit. In addition, the Researcher Mobility Grant was responsible for Julio obtaining a grant from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). FAPESP rejected an earlier application for a Young Investigators Award due to lack of international experience.
"Having been awarded with this grant from the RSC helped to change FAPESP’s decision, because it was awarded by an international and well-recognised institution," he explained, "this success was proof of my 'outstanding productivity in research or technology'."
These collaborative visits can also help our members bring back and introduce new ideas and techniques to their home institutions. When one of Steven’s postdoctoral researchers visited Julio in Brazil, he gave seminars at various Brazilian universities about his work in the Ley Group.
"This was an opportunity to advertise flow chemistry here in Brazil and make it more popular. There are just a few researchers doing flow chemistry so far."
The collaboration has also since been cemented with further exchanges between the groups. Julio has sent one of his Masters students to the Ley group for a part of his project, whilst he also expects one of his PhD students to make a similar visit in 2018.
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