Lamprou Lab Blog

  If you join the Lamprou group, it's not only for   its academic side and the perspective of spending your next three years in the lab of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences (SIPBS). Let's admit it, we love   passing a spare couple of hours in social activities.   Winter has arrived once again, and we   could not miss out a Christmas party with the   rest of the group, even if   this occurred a little bit early in our calendar, at the very beginning of December.

November 2014 I had the chance to attend the Health Care Infection Society (HIS;   www.his.org.uk/ ).  I must admit, with my background in engineering and design, attending an event primarily targeted at clinicians and microbiologist was a little daunting. There was a real fear that I was in for three days of talks that would go entirely over my head. Thankfully though this was not the case and over the course of the conference, I managed to attend a wide range of interesting presentations. Topics ranged from those directly related to my work, such as endoscope decontamination and water borne pathogens, to talks more applicable to microbiology as a whole such as the slightly daunting concept of viable-but-non-culturable bacteria (how dead is really dead?!).

With winter fast approaching and the early onset of seasonal affective disorder just round the corner it was concluded that in order to raise the groups’ spirits an outing should be prescribed. Since lab rats do not get out the lab often we decided to organise a self-guided mystery tour of our wonderful base city of Glasgow. With countless free museums in Glasgow ( http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/ ) throughout hiding some of the best collections in the world, along with a simple easy-to-use underground system ( www.spt.co.uk/subway/ ) a trail was set up to take three teams from a secret location to a secret location covering the entire city. A great way to not only show-off some of the spectacular sights of the Commonwealth games host city to the new students from further afield but it was also a chance for the students who are residents to revisit some well-loved trips and tourist hot spots.

Being a parent is far from easy; however it is one of the most rewarding things a person can do. Being a teen parent, on the other hand, often carries with it a “stigma” which leads to many other issues for the young mother. We say mother as the teenage parents are often unmarried and living apart, so the father sometimes manages to “escape” many of the duties that a parent should be responsible for, leading to little effect on “normal” life.