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From left: Sam Blanchett and Denver Britto

Congratulations to Sam Blanchett who has successfully defended his PhD thesis and Denver Britto on an ‘Outstanding Poster Award for a Graduate Student’ at the recent Developmental Vascular Biology and Genetics Workshop.

Sam has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled, ‘PilVax: A novel peptide carrier for the development of vaccines against tuberculosis’. The PhD project was supervised by Associate Professor Thomas Proft and Dr Jacelyn Loh. The work was done in collaboration with A/Prof Jo Kirman at Otago University in Dunedin. Sam is currently working on a manuscript to publish his findings in an international scientific journal.

Denver was awarded an ‘Outstanding Poster Award for a Graduate Student’ at the recent Developmental Vascular Biology and Genetics Workshop at Asilomar, USA. Denver is supervised by Dr Jonathan Astin and is a PhD student in the Astin lab working on the genetic control of lymphatic vessel growth. His poster described the characterisation of a novel zebrafish mutant, identifying a new regulator of lymphatic growth that is essential for proper vessel patterning.