Harry Potter and the Myelinating Cultures

So I’ve been pretty busy this week with a real mixture of things!

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is currently happening and the main centre of activity is the Uni’s own student union building Teviot. On Tuesday I was running a workshop for kids which teaches them about their brain, how it controls emotions and how it changes during adolescence. We used clips from the first Harry Potter film to demonstrate different emotions and what “magic spells” or neurotransmitters were causing that emotion. It was a great fun way to have a break from the labs and the kids loved it too. Although Lion King 3D is on tomorrow so I’m not sure they would pick my workshop over that!

This was followed by a lab visit to Glasgow on Wednesday. Our lab is always looking for ways to improve and learn new techniques and so we got in touch with a group at Glasgow Uni to show us how to prepare a new type of cell culture. It was good to see what other labs are like compared to your own and everyone . there was really nice. Usually neurones are grown as a homogeneous population in culture but this technique allows you to grow neurones and oligodendrocytes together so that some of the axons become myelinated. This gives a more accurate model of the brain in cell culture hopefully it will be very useful in the course of my PhD studies.

Lots of exciting stuff going on in July as well, graduations start next week and preparations for the festival so I will keep you updated with that in due course.

Callum

First Post

Hi everyone!

I'm Callum one of the new Student Ambassadors for the College of Medicine and Vet Medicine at Edinburgh Uni.  I'm a PhD student working in the Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology studying mitochondria dysfunctions in models of dementia.

I also do a lot of neuroscience Public Engagement work such as running interactive workshops for kids and writing for the Uni science magazine.

Ill be keeping my blog updated with news from my research, public engagement and other exciting stuff happening in Edinburgh!

Cheers,
Callum