I’m signing off from 2022 on annual leave today. I’ve been proud and privileged to lead the MINDS Lab over the last year and to support our very talented trainees. We have had a fantastic year, and I want to share with you some of the highlights:
- We got off to an interesting start as our lab grew by 50% and I returned from a year of maternity leave (where I was truly research-inactive with a newborn and 2 year old in lockdown). We found our rhythm in no time, although I won’t forget the out of body experience (particularly driving to work on my first day back and momentarily freaking out that there was no baby in the carseat)!
- We received a $15,000 donation from Vax The Illawarra, a community event which has funded a key component of our mental health research.
- Our PhD students, Dominic and Amber, accompanied me to the Biological Psychiatry Australia meeting, our first conference together. We road tripped and stayed together. We had a great time and I enjoyed introducing them to the many researchers in our field, something they hadn’t experienced yet due to the pandemic.
- Dominic also published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience which contributes towards his PhD work, dissecting the effects of stress on astrocytes in mental illnesses.
- We welcomed Sara, an undergraduate intern from the Netherlands into our lab for a semester. She was supervised by our PhD student Amber and got to experience the inner workings of our lab and postmortem brain research
- Dominic and I attended the Australian Neuroscience Society meeting. Dominic gave a fantastic poster presentation that garnered a lot of interest. I was selected to give a talk about my work on FKBP5, which started with Elisabeth Binder at the Max Planck and was the subject of Katrina’s excellent (and huge) Honours thesis.
- We participated in the 10x Genomics Spatial Pioneers Fellowship program and set up Visium in our lab. Huge shoutout to James Fraser from 10x for the in-person support, along with the whole team who have gone above and beyond, and Dominic and Amber for independently spearheading this work.
We have finished off the year with a bang, with Katrina and Jyi successfully completing Honours and both were awarded a Class 1. This is an outstanding effort from a highly dedicated year of work. I was also promoted to Senior Fellow. With this increasing seniority comes credibility to chase bigger hairy audacious goals for our program, and making a bigger scientific impact. This filters down to our trainees and the quality of their research experience, and for this I am truly thankful.
Going into 2023, I am absolutely thrilled that our lab has received a $635,000 Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to study human adult neurogenesis, the biggest grant awarded to our university. This is a true passion project, and having this work funded opens the doors for our lab to do bigger, better, and more impactful science.
We are also getting closer to the publication of two big papers, the first the FKBP5 postmortem brain work, and a very interesting paper I am co-leading with my colleagues at the Max Planck of Psychiatry and Helmholtz on risk-variant-exon-interplay. Excited to have these projects out into the wild.
In 2023, we will be joined by two new Honours students who I’ve had the pleasure to get to know through an undergraduate research project, and a new international PhD student joining us in the Spring. Stay tuned for the details in early 2023. We are also looking forward to recruiting a postdoc on our DP grant, so look out for the advertisement and share with your networks – especially those that have some NGS experience.
All these achievements would not be possible without the support of our lab members, mentors, colleagues, collaborators, brain banks, donors/their families, and funding bodies. Thank you for all you do to help us succeed and bring us closer to preventing the suffering caused by brain illnesses.
Our humble lab is growing into something incredibly exciting, and I can’t wait to take you along on the journey with us. Bring on 2023, we are so ready for it.
Happy and safe holidays to all
– Natalie
