Summer research placement - Jake Soley

During the summer after the second year of the Biomedical Science programme students are able to undertake a summer research research project, either within the College or abroad. Jake Soley, BSc Biomedical Science student, shares his experience at the Université de Tours, France.

During the summer between second and third year, many Biomedical Science students decide to undertake a laboratory placement in order to gain research skills for final year (and beyond). I knew that I wanted to pursue academia and so a research placement would be invaluable to me. I had only just begun my search for a placement when the Biomedical Science programme announced a new opportunity to spend a month at the Université de Tours in France – oh la la! The chance to hone my lab skills whilst exploring one of my favourite countries and practising French? C’est parfait!

Several weeks later, I received confirmation that my application was successful and I would be journeying to the Loire Valley along with 7 other students in the cohort. We all planned our routes, bid each other ‘Bon Voyage’ and set off separately – a friend and I decided to travel via the Eurostar and spent our day on 6 different trains, taking around 8 hours to arrive! The following morning we met with representatives from the university and had a brief tour of the campus and the beautiful city centre.

Monday morning came quickly and before I knew it I was meeting with my supervisor, a PhD student researching antibody aerosolisation and aggregation. The first activity of the day is always coffee, she explained, and I spent the first half hour meeting the lab group over pain au chocolat and croissants. Then she showed me her labs, explained her project and where I was going to fit into this, and invited me along to the regional respiratory research conference which just so happened to be on my first day. This was a fantastic chance to see where my work was going to fit in with the current research trends (plus, the hors d’œuvres were a nice surprise - I could easily get used to the French way of life…).

By the end of the first week, I felt much more comfortable in a lab environment; I had my own lab coat and bench space and had started to plan out experiments for the rest of my time in Tours. This was the first taste of independent research that I had ever had and it really furthered my desire to study a PhD and pursue an academic career. My supervisor was always around to help but, once confident in my ability, was more than happy to give me that independence. Every now and then she’d explain something in French so I got the chance to practice another language. In the second week she was away at another conference for a couple of days and so left me in the supervision of a colleague who couldn’t even say hello in English, so my language skills were really put the test (and my charades skills also improved dramatically!).

My experiments revolved around nebulisation of monoclonal antibodies then measuring aggregation to identify a nebuliser that caused the least damage to antibodies. I prepared antibody solutions to remove excipients that could act as a confounding variable. Nebulisations were carried out under a fume hood and the aerosol was collected with a glass collection structure called an Impinger. The collected liquid was then analysed using a Flow Cell Microscope and then with Dynamic Light Scattering - both these machines detect tiny particles in the solutions which are antibody aggregates. As I started generating data, I was given some office space to begin analysing and formatting graphs and figures. Some days, where I was waiting for experiments to finish, I had to spend time reading journal articles to increase my knowledge of the research area more generally.

Every weekend, all of us from Birmingham would decide on where to visit. The Loire valley is famous for its chateaux; in one weekend we managed to see 5 different castles! Tours has excellent transport links, and one Saturday we caught the TGV (high speed train) to Paris to go to a festival. The weather was extremely hot and we really made the most of our time in another country. It made the difficult days in the lab much easier knowing that when you clocked off at 5 you could visit the medieval city centre, head to a restaurant in the food capital of the world, or even have a dip in the Loire River.

When we returned to Birmingham, we presented our findings at a student symposium. This mock conference was open to all three years of the Biomedical Science programme and was a great way to show off the work we’d been doing. I had prepared a conference-style poster summarising my results, the background of the research and the conclusions of the study. This was an amazing opportunity to create (and present) a research poster which is essential for the collaborative nature of scientific research, and something which I can boast about when applying for PhD positions!