Summer Studentships

Up to six studentships of £2000 are offered, split evenly between physical sciences, biological sciences and interdisciplinary projects.

Applications for our Summer Studentships must include a significant microscopy component and should be submitted by suitable host academic on behalf of a student. The Studentship is offered on the understanding that a 500 word project report is completed by the student by the end of the period of study and submitted to the RMS. The report should be in the form of an abstract with Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results and Discussion. It should also include images/data.

Awards will be made to students at the end of their second year of study for a three year degree or at the end of their second or third years for four year degree courses. Master’s students are not eligible. £1500 should be allocated by the supervisor to the student as a bursary to cover living expenses and £500 can be used to cover experimental and laboratory expenses.

The person making the application must be a Member or Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society. If you have any questions about this award please contact Debbie Hunt.

2018 Summer Studentship Recipients

Stephen Watson (Physical Sciences)
Stephen Watson is working towards his Master’s degree at the University of Glasgow.  He proposes to study 3 dimensional magnetic structures using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Currently magnetic data storage is mostly confined to 2D planar structures, utilising the 3rd dimension offers great prospects for future applications.

Rashid Khashiev (Physical Sciences)
Rashid is a second year student in Natural Sciences (NST) at the University of Cambridge.  Rashid’s experience in fluorescence microscopy and computational image analysis will help to carry out the proposed microscopical analysis of embryonic development in the green micro-algae Volvox and other members of the family Volvocaceae.

Tilly Hancock (Physics applied to life)
Tilly is in her second year of a Master’s degree in physics at the University of Bristol.  Her interest in the processes of photosynthesis and plants’ self-regulation is the ultimate focus of the proposed project.  After first hearing about methods of imaging biological matter, such as laser confocal microscopy, on a STEM summer school, she has become enthused about using microscopy, imaging and spectroscopy for a biological or medical purpose. This project will combine these two interests, using structured light scanning in microscopy to enable to study stomata in plant leaves.

Owen Underwood, (Life Sciences)
Owen  is a second year undergraduate in Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the University of Nottingham, and the project aims to validate the Teluc BRET imaging technique and investigate receptor pharmacology at the endogenous single cell level. The programme of work will involve investigation of single cell ligand binding using bioluminescence microscopy in previously established live cells engineered with CRISPR/Cas9 to express Teluc/ β2AR or Nluc/ β2AR under endogenous promotion as well as over-expressed receptors.  It will provide for high quality training in cutting edge microscopy and CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering techniques.

Emma McCormick (Physical and Life Sciences)
Emma McCormick is currently in her third year of an MPhys Physics degree at the Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde.  Using microscopy to understand the cell biology of Streptomycetes is vital to understand their life cycles, morphological changes caused by secondary metabolite production and quantifying production of extracellular components.  The primary aim of this project is to use standing wave microscopy (SWM) to study the morphology of various Streptomycete strains of interest which have various mutations causing changes in their metabolite production.

Once their projects have been completed, all five students will write up their work for our membership magazine infocus.



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