See links below for the reports of the two recipients of the Porterfield Prize 2015.

Chong Long Chua travelled from his home laboratory in Kuala Lumpur to that of Professor Andres Merits in Estonia, to undertake the reverse genetics of Chikungunya viruses, isolated in Malaysia, in order to study the neutralization epitopes of these viruses

Yannick Debbing travelled from his home laboratory in Leuven to that of Professor Bruno Canard in Marseille to develop an in vitro assay for the Hepatitis E virus RNA polymerase.

Visit report JSP 2015 Chua CL

JSPP_Report_Yannick_Debing

Read Nadia Storm’s report on her research visit to Hokkaido University from Pretoria, funded in part by a James S Porterfield Prize in International Virology, in which she undertook very timely work to develop new diagnostic reagents for Filoviruses, such as Marburg and Ebola viruses.

Karen Ocwieja’s report of her Porterfield Prize-sponsored work in Sri Lanka is to befound here

Graduate scholarships for PhD students in the JamesLab are available through two competitive schemes.

1. Four year Wellcome Trust DPhil programme in Infection, Immunology and Translational Medicine. This involves three rotations in year 1 between laboratories in different departments of the Medical Sciences Division in Oxford. Further details here.
2. Four year DPhil Departmental Prize Studentship Competition. This is spent entirely within one laboratory at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. Closing date 4th January 2013. Further detals here.

James S Porterfield Prize in International Virology 2013

Closing date January14th 2013

This prize (£600) is to be awarded by open competition to up to two students of virology registered for a degree at any University worldwide.

The inaugural prize has been awarded to Karen Ocwieja, who is studying for an MD-PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She will be travelling to the Genetech Research Institute, Sri Lanka to study the “Phylogeography and molecular epidemiology of an epidemic strain of dengue” under the supervision of Dharshan De Silva.

Our collaborative work on derivation and characterisation of macrophages from induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with Chronic Granulomatous Disease is to be published in Stem Cells. The paper shows that the functional deficit in CGD (failure of oxidative burst capacity due to mutations in phagocyte oxidase subunits) is faithfully reproduced in iPSc-derived macrophages.

Jiang Y ^*, Cowley SA ^*, Siler U ^* , Melguzo D, Tilgner K, Browne C, deWilton A, Pryzborski S, Saretzki G,James WS, Reichenbach J, Seger RA, Lako M and Armstrong L. ^*  joint first authors. Derivation and functional analysis of patient specific induced pluripotent stem cells as an in vitro model of Chronic Granulomatous Disease. Stem Cells 2012 in press