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Saturday May 17, 2025

Congratulations to Oliver Skinner
2023 ASI Career Advancement Award

We warmly congratulate
Oliver Skinner
winner of the 2023 ASI Career Advancement Award

 

I am a postdoctoral researcher in A/Prof. Ashraful Haque's lab at the Peter Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne. I would like to gratefully thank ASI for the career advancement award which has helped support conference travel and meeting collaborators.

A summer's day in Galway city centre during some downtime after the EMBO workshop.

After completing my PhD at the Garvan Institute with Prof. Mike Rogers and Dr. Marcia Munoz I decided to further my skills in single cell and tissue genomics on experimental models of malaria at the Doherty Institute. The Haque lab focusses on mainly lymphocyte differentiation and dynamics during the course of malaria, a disease which remains a massive global killer despite years of research. Specifically, my project focusses on B cell responses to Plasmodium infection, cells that are critical for generating long-lasting humoral immunity, which is sub-optimal in patients during malaria. Using unbiased transcriptomic and BCR sequencing of single, polyclonal B cells in mice infected with malaria, I have started to elucidate the complex processes of B cell differentiation. Furthermore, our lab has been at the forefront of spatial transcriptomics technology which I have been using to understand the microanatomical locations of different B cell subsets during infection, with the aim to describe the microenvironment needed to sustain extramedullary lymphopoiesis, a process of emergency B cell development in the spleen.

The ASI Career Advancement award has allowed me to travel to Galway, Ireland in July 2024 where I presented my work at the EMBO workshop on "Lymphatic tissues and germinal centres in immune reactions". This is a prestigious conference occurring every 2 years which brings together eminent scientists in the field of germinal centres, such as Shane Crotty, Gabriel Victora and Carola Vinuesa, to name but a few. I gained valuable feedback on my projects as well as established and solidified a network of collaborators. Additionally, I made a lab visit to Sarah Teichmann's laboratory at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, UK. The Teichmann lab are pioneers in single cell and tissue genomics and are long time collaborators of the lab. I presented my projects to the group and gained valuable insight into technical and bioinformatic approaches that I hope to implement in my own research. These opportunities have allowed me to foster an international network of collaborators and mentors which I feel will make me competitive for investigator and ideas grant applications in the coming years as well as help innovate ongoing projects in the lab.

The Cambridge Stem Cell Institute where I met and presented my work to the Teichmann lab.

Author: Oliver Skinner

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ASI