We had a range of PI and postdoc speakers from across CBCB, and two excellent external speakers. Lauren Drage of Phil Aldridge's group won the first Symposium poster competition with Martin Sim and Clare Wilson winning the runners-up prizes.

The day ended with a fun barbecue and the chance for everyone to see the posters and to network with people from all over CBCB.

Read our blog post about the event.

External speakers

Professor John Helmann

Department of Microbiology, Cornell University

John Helmann earned bachelor`s degrees in Chemistry and Biology (University of California, Santa Cruz) in 1982. He then joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied bacterial RNA polymerase with Dr. Michael Chamberlin and earned a Ph.D. in 1987. From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Helmann worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Christopher T. Walsh at the Harvard Medical School. His post-doctoral research, on the regulation of bacterial mercuric ion resistance determinants, was supported by the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Medical Research Foundation. Dr. Helmann joined the Section of Microbiology at Cornell as an Assistant Professor in 1990 and joined the graduate field of Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology in 1991. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996 and Professor in 2002.

His laboratory studies Bacillus subtilis, a Gram-positive soil bacterium and genetic model system. Major research efforts address the stress responses elicited by (i) antibiotics that affect the cell envelope, (ii) reactive oxygen species, or (iii) deficiency or excess of nutrient metal ions.

Read more about Professor Helmann.

Professor Mark Leake

Anniversary Chair of Biological Physics, Department of Biology, University of York Professor Mark Leake

Mark Leake is Professor and Anniversary Chair of Biological Physics at the University of York, UK, and the founder and current Director of its Biological Physical Sciences Institute (BPSI). He earned his Masters degree at Cambridge and his PhD in biophysics from London in 1997. He carried out postdoctoral research in Oxford and the Ruprect-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg.

He is now also supported by the Royal Society to establish experimental means to investigate biological systems at a single molecule level. He is co-hosted by the Physics and Biology Depts at the University of York and a visiting professor at the University of Oxford. He develops robust single-molecule biophysics techniques and analysis, especially through state of the art optical technologies, which permit the investigations of biochemistry in real time in single living cells to a precision of single molecules. His group specializes in developing and applying novel forms of optical microscopy to investigate complex biological processes at the level of single molecules.

Read more about Professor Leake.

Further information

Find out more about the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology Symposia.