Georgina Menzies

Dementia Research - meet the scientists Big data, fruit flies and the battle against brain diseases

A pleasure to welcome @rorycj.bsky.social to the UK DRI at Cardiff! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Rory has written a fantastic blog about his experience meeting discovery scientists developing the next generation of treatments for Parkinson's & other neurodegenerative conditions

rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/dementia-r...

Happy to announce our latest article, a tutorial on running Gaussian-accelerated MD simulations in NAMD. Tour de force work by @hmmichel.bsky.social with @mdpoleto.bsky.social that unifies theory and practice in one place!

livecomsjournal.org/index.php/li...

No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done.
clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...

‘They’re skin and bones’: doctors in Gaza warn babies at risk of death from lack of formula Doctors say Israel is blocking deliveries of formula urgently needed as mothers are either dead or too malnourished to feed their babies

There is no justification on earth for blocking deliveries of baby formula to starving babies and mothers.

What Israel is inflicting on Gaza is monstrous, genocidal.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

CASP is the main reason the protein structure prediction technology and research field advanced over the last 30 years. And the main reason AI based methods have been accepted and widely applied in biology. So shortsighted of NIH to postpone or even halt funding. John Moult is a scientific hero.

Heat and a newborn is not a great combo 🥵

Just found out my nomination to join the biochemical society as a member of the grants panel was successful 🎉 working really hard for the first 5 months of this year is starting to pay off 🤣

Image shows the front page of the paper listing author names, journal title and the abstract. The link will take you to the same page

New paper 🚨super proud of this collaborative effort, and grateful to my co-authors for answering the reviewer comments whilst I was on mat leave. You can find it here pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

This is madness!

One week left in work before maternity leave and I don’t want to speak to soon but I am really getting through my to do list 😆 no one derail me now please!

Next up prof. Vincent Dion from the @ukdri.ac.uk is talking science fact, not science fiction, and telling us about his groups approach to finding a treatment for Huntingtons. @alzheimersresearchuk.org

Our second speaker of the day, Dr Lelos talking to us about cell therapy and how this might be used to treat Huntingtons. @alzheimersresearchuk.org

Image shows a researcher in a stage explaining Huntington’s disease. He is talking about the CAG expansion found in this disease.

ARUK public engagement at the @cardiffcity.bsky.social stadium. Dr Massey kicking it off by talking to us about Huntington’s Disease, what it is and how we might be cure it. @alzheimersresearchuk.org

Pre-announcement: MARTINI tutorial workshop, August 11-15th 2025 in Groningen, The Netherlands !!
Learn basic and advanced Martini from the cocktail masters themselves. Registration will open soon.

Some good news for a change–Queen's has set aside funds to assist any students who have lost their visa status in the US and are looking to continue their graduate studies. Please share widely.

www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Good luck!

"The UK's upfront immigration costs now vastly exceed other leading research nations, so the UK is struggling to compete. EU countries can more easily attract talent from the EU due to free movement, and from non-EU countries due to their relatively low visa costs. "Non-EU countries are also attractive to global research talent due to lower comparative immigration costs than the UK." British scientific institutions are having to spend huge sums on visa costs for cancer professionals they wish to attract and recruit. The Francis Crick Institute, one of the world's leading biomedical research centres, is now spending more than £500,000 a year on visas for cancer scientists. Cancer Research UK institutes are spending almost £690,000 a year, up 44% from £470,000 in 2022-23.

Another report on how our high visa costs deter top R&D talent
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

AF2χ: Predicting protein side-chain rotamer distributions with AlphaFold2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.16.649219v1

Our lab is hiring 1 PhD and 1 Postdoc to study the mechanism of lipid transport using computational methods (Molecular Dynamics, AI). Fully funded by @snsf-ch.bsky.social for 4 years, with amazing collaborators and excellent life and working conditions. Apply by email. Please share and repost!

📢 Our article calling for a #FAIR database for #MolecularDynamics simulation data has now been peer-reviewed and published in @naturemethods.bsky.social

📖 Read it here: rdcu.be/ef6YX

📝 Support the statement: bit.ly/3zVS3qm

#MDDB #FAIRdata #collaboration

Final taught session of the year is done 🎉 I still have marking and in person assessments to do, but with 7 weeks left till I go on maternity leave it feels pretty good to be concentrating on final research bits and making sure all my students are in a good place before I go. 🧬🖥️

The Free Energy Workshop (feworkshop.bsky.social) will happen on May 6-8th. If you're an unemployed #CompChem modeller or researcher and want to attend to network but cannot afford the $215 registration fee, please DM me.

Associate Professor in Deep Learning Health Bioinformatics – DTU Health Tech If you are in your early career as a Bioinformatics researcher and you are seeking the best possible foundation to establish your own group in the academic world, the opportunity is right here in fron...

📣 Please share: TENURED ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR 👇

Establish your own group at DTU Health Tech! Deadline April 22nd '25

Tags #bioinformatics #dataScience #machineLearning #deepLearning #artificialIntelligence #AI #python #Rstats #teaching #research #academia

efzu.fa.em2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

More than 2 decades ago the PINK1 protein was found to be linked to Parkinson's disease, but its structure and how it was activated was not known. Until @science.org today. A triumph for cryo-EM and structural biology, introducing new targets for drug intervention.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

They did so well taking on a brand new subject (computational biology) and all managed to run some simulations, get great data, and write about it 💻🧬 it was a pleasure to have four future budding female scientists and doctors join our group for a couple of months

There is a lot of stress around job cuts and changes in the university at the minute, but Friday my lovely project students gave me the nicest card to say thank you for the help I gave them during their project. Little things like that from students make lots of the hard work so very worth it! 🥰

ARUK “impact of dementia on women” report graphic

Dementia devastates the lives of everyone it touches, but this #internationalwomensday let’s highlight the impact it has on women: www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/about-us/our...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: The Spectrum of Ability in the Workplace: Learning About Our Largest Workplace “Minority”. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. We know that everyone is unique but we like to bucket people - difference of any kind scares us and makes us wary of interaction. To create an engaged world and workforce it is essential to recognize…

FREE WEBINAR for #BiophysicsWeek!
March 27 at 1 PM Eastern
The Spectrum of Ability in the Workplace: Learning About Our Largest Workplace “Minority”

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

🚨 All right, since this is a place of sanity now, let’s kick things off with an open PhD position in my team to work on simulating glycans and their interactions. If you’re passionate about computational biophysics and glycobiology, go ahead and apply! Any shares would be greatly appreciated. 🙃