To celebrate the end of a successful year at Ludwig Oxford, staff, students and facilities/professional services teams joined together for a two-day retreat to discuss science and bond as a community. Throughout the event, principal investigators (PIs) tested their communication skills with short ‘chalk and talk’ sessions designed to get across their scientific research without the aid of a handy presentation, students and research staff presented posters displaying their projects to each other, competitions to test scientific writing and artistic creativity were held and a full-Branch team building exercise was enjoyed by all!
Special congratulations to the various winners from the event: Professor Richard White for the best PI talk; Vinny Pereira Almeida for the best poster; Stephen Ash and Alina Mihalovits for the best scientific writing pieces and Masooma Rajput for the best Art piece on the theme of Regeneration. Of course, a special thanks must also go to our team of volunteer organisers who worked hard to create a retreat that brought everyone together so well! Thank you to Richard White, Marie-Laure Foisneau-Bates, Michael McClellan, Romuald Binet, Joanna Lima, Emelie Shepherd, Felice Wallner, Amanda Wicki and Claudia Zagami.
This year has been highly successful, with a number of excellent publications from our research teams including: the first publication from Ludwig Oxford’s first clinical trial; a new method designed for the improved detection of modifications to the DNA base cytosine; the discovery that hypertension treatment drugs may play a role in boosting clinical immunotherapy; and many more. We also celebrated Tammie Bishop becoming an associate professor, Richard White becoming a professor of genetics and new leadership fellow Marketa Tomkova joining the team. A number of our researchers were also recognised in awards throughout the year, including Yang Shi who was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences, Richard White who was awarded for his outstanding research by the Society for Melanoma Research and DPhil student Olly Featherstone who received an MSD Teaching Excellence Award.
We are so proud of the continuous work everyone at Ludwig Oxford does to contribute to cancer research and wish everyone a restful break and a Happy New Year.