I am thrilled to have won the 2010 Young Investigator Award from the British Society for Matrix Biology (BSMB).

The BSMB is a learned society for scientists with an interest in the extracellular matrix and related subjects. I have been a member of the BSMB since I joined the lab of Professor Martin Humphries as a PhD student (I also designed the BSMB logo in 2006!), and it is an honour to be chosen for this prestigious award.

BSMB logo // Image by Adam Byron // Reproduced with permission from BSMB

BSMB logo

I will receive the award at the BSMB Autumn Meeting in Norwich on Monday (6 September 2010), where I will also be presenting the Young Investigator Award lecture.

I am pleased to have been selected to present a talk at the 7th Joint BSPR/EBI Proteomics Meeting in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, 13th-15th July 2010. The conference is entitled “Proteomics: From Qualitative to Quantitative” and will focus on advances in qualitative and quantitative insights into biological processes using proteomics. I will present recent work on the analysis of integrin adhesion complex dynamics.

I am very grateful to have been awarded an MJ Dunn Fellowship to enable me to attend this meeting.

I am pleased to have been selected to present a short talk at the upcoming ProteoMMX meeting in Chester, UK, 19th-21st April. My “elevated abstract” presentation will describe my current work in the lab of Professor Martin Humphries (University of Manchester, UK) on the quantitative proteomic analysis of integrin adhesion complexes.

The meeting is entitled “Strictly Quantitative” and will cover all aspects of quantitative proteomics. It promises to be an interesting meeting, and the programme of invited speakers looks really good!

After several months of construction, I am excited to announce that the website for our lab, the Humphries Lab website, has gone live!

I am co-webmaster along with Guillaume Jacquemet in the lab. The website contains an overview of the lab and its members, the research we conduct, our publications and a resource for the public and media. Please visit the website and feel free to leave feedback.

Integrin heterodimer // Image by Adam Byron

Alongside the release of the website is the initiation of a lab Twitter account. Anyone in our research group may tweet from this account, and these tweets will also integrate into the lab website. Please follow @humphrieslab for news and updates from the lab.

Our recent Science Signaling Research Article is featured in Signaling Breakthroughs of the Year published in the current issue of Science Signaling.

The Signaling Breakthroughs of the Year Editorial Guide is an annual feature that shortlists the most important cell signalling advances of the previous year. Science Signaling Chief Scientific Editor Michael Yaffe (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) highlighted our proteomic analysis of integrin signalling complexes as a notable contribution to the development of methodologies that enable network-level analyses of signal transduction, an important theme of this year’s selected signalling breakthroughs.

I am also pleased to have created one of the figures used in the Editorial Guide.