JAMS turns 3

Wednesday night, we celebrated the third birthday of JAMS (Joint Academic Microbial Seminars)- a monthly microbiology seminar series held at the Australiam Museum in Sydney. The celebration as usual took the form of an annual dinner in the Dinosaur Room at the Australian Museum. This was preceded by talks from special guest speakers. David Bourne from the Australian Institute of Marine Science gave a great talk on the microbial inhabitants of corals. Teresa Zelante gave a fascinating talk, which I half understood, on the interplay between the immune system and your gut bacteria, nd how they cooperate to fight pathogens. And I gave my first ever talk at a JAMS meeting- Building Virtual Cyanobacteria: To Metagenomics and Beyond! As part of my talk and accompanied by the beautiful artwork you see below, I told the story of how JAMS first started, when Federico Lauro gave several Sydney microbiologists a mysterious invitation to a pub in Surrey Hills, and after some beers the plan for JAMS came together.

One of the slides from my talk showing an artists reconstruction of how JAMS started