Department of Oncology Student Symposium 2023

This year’s Department of Oncology Student Symposium was held on Thursday 22 June in the Richard Doll Building at the Old Road Campus. First year DPhil and MSc by Research students presented scientific posters of their work to date in the three poster sessions. There was a lovely atmosphere around the poster hall, with lots of positive discussion of each other’s work.

Second year DPhil students took the stage in the Richard Doll Lecture Theatre to present their hard work to an audience of their peers in one of four presentation sessions. Each student gave a 10-minute presentation of their work and this was followed by questions from the audience, which were brilliantly chaired by volunteers from among our third- and fourth-year DPhil students. The keynote talk this year was delivered by Professor Colin Goding from the Ludwig Institute. Colin discussed his research in microenvironment-driven phenotype-switching in melanoma biology, which inspired lots of questions and discussion from the audience.

Julius Bannister, winner of the ‘Best Presentation’ prize is presented his award by Professor Mark Middleton

Throughout the day our panel of volunteer judges were busily scoring all of the presentations and posters to determine the winner of the ‘Best Presentation’ and ‘Best Poster’ prizes. The ‘Best Presentation’ prize winner was Julius Bannister, from the Blackford Group for his talk on ‘Using orthologue complementation to reveal functional amino acid residues in tumor suppressor proteins’. The winner of the ‘Best Poster’ was Subashan Vadibeler, from the Parkes Group, with his poster on ‘The role of fibroblast ENPP1 expression on anti-tumour immunity’.
 

Students enjoying drinks in The Blackwell Quad at St Cross College at the symposium dinner

 At the end of the day students and staff convened at St Cross College for the symposium dinner. This is the second year we have offered a dinner at the end of the symposium and this initiative has been very well received, with approximately 60 students joining us for dinner this year.