Graduate OMT Travel Report – Nadya Fursova

Thanks to the support of the Old Members Trust Travel Grant, I was able to attend the CSHL Meeting on Epigenetics & Chromatin this year. The conference took place on 11-15 September in the beautiful setting of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) located on Long Island, New York.

CSHL is an iconic place for every researcher in Molecular biology as it is famous for being a home of the cutting-edge science since the very beginning of the field. The conference organizers did an amazing job of bringing together leading scientists working in the field of Epigenetics & Chromatin from all over the world. The scientific programme of the conference was very intensive, with talks finishing at 10.30pm in the late evening every day. An incredible selection of presented work covered the most recent advances in all the different areas of Chromatin biology, with a pronounced focus on the specific area of my DPhil studies, and included a lot of unpublished data.

I was selected to present the findings of my DPhil work at the poster session during the conference. In my project, I have discovered the central determinants of gene silencing by Polycomb Repressive Complex 1 (PRC1), which is one of the major epigenetic regulators that plays an essential role in early embryonic development. To achieve this, I have used a combination of the cutting-edge genome engineering and Next-Generation Sequencing techniques to systematically dissect the role of all distinct types of PRC1 complexes (of which there are six) in mouse embryonic stem cells. During the poster session, I especially enjoyed many lively discussions of my project which carried on well after the poster session was over.

I was very pleased to find out that my work and presentation were very well received by the conference attendees and were even highlighted on the official social media of the meeting. In addition to getting a lot of valuable feedback, I found the poster session to be an excellent way to practice presenting my research to a wider scientific audience, including both experts in the field as well as scientists from different research areas.

Overall, attending the CSHL meeting was a very fruitful experience which provided me with a lot of opportunities for discussions, networking and establishing collaborations, and I am very grateful to the College for supporting my attendance.

Find out more about the range of travel grants and scholarships available to assist Univ students on our Travel Grants page or read further travel reports.

Published: 13 November 2018

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