Elisabeth Ehler
Randall Centre Seminar Series goes virtual

We had a mascot, we had an energetic Randall Seminar organiser and so in these challenging Covid-19-caused lockdown times we went virtual - and what a success it turned out to be! Record numbers of attendees even for PhD student progress reports, which sadly often only tend to have attendance numbers that verge on the “tribal”. Star of the show was obviously Primo, the ECG-vest wearing dolphin in Mike Shattock’s talk but also the talks from the KCL external speakers Luiz de Carvalho (FCI) and Barbara Conradt (UCL) on bacterial metabolic enzymes and apoptosis in C. elegans went down a treat and the Randall PIs Elisabetta Brunello, Sasi Conte and Thomas Kampourakis made muscle biophysics, reaction kinetics and more muscle biophysics “almost” understandable. However, a very special mention has to go to our Randall (and not quite so Randall) PhD students Mike Attwaters, Tapan Pipalia, Reuben Yaa, Zain Alhashem, Natalie Al-Otaibi and Alexandra Parker, who each braved the challenge to speak to the virtual “void” and gave absolutely outstanding presentations on their PhD projects - demonstrating the rainbow characteristics of Randall science from the atom to developmental biology. After a well deserved summer break, we plan to continue streaming the seminars even if back in our natural habitat G8 to allow access for people who happen to be off campus.