Au revoir Fran!

Over the past 3 months, the Paulsen lab has hosted Dr Fran Pitt, a visiting scientist from the University of Warwick, UK working with Prof Dave Scanlan. Fran is a long time colleague of Martin Ostrowski and Sophie Mazard from their time in the UK. She has been working for quite a few years on all things cyanobacterial, from detailing sensing and regulatory mechanisms of phosphate stress in freshwater Synechocystis sp. to environmental transcriptomics of marine cyanobacteria.
She recently took part in the Atlantic Meridional Transect in October 2012 (AMT) a research expedition sampling waters from Southampton, UK down to Punta Arenas in Chile. And liked it so much she has also obtained a couple of berths to participate in the coming AMT this October. We will certainly talk again about the AMT cruises in future blog posts.
Fran took some time out of her busy schedule in the UK to take advantage of our newly updated Flow Cytometry facility (MQ FC), and continue the development of her work on some fresh water samples she collected during the monthly Port Hacking run (Post).

Fran has gone back home to the UK last week, but we hope she will come back soon to say hi.

Best wishes from all of us on her future adventures!

On the monthly Port Hacking sampling run

With the creator of the Influx cell sorter Ger van den Engh

Sorting cells on a flow cytometer can be fun!