Academic Visit to QMUL, United Kingdom

Newton-Ungku Omar Travel Grant; In the month of April 2019, two of the lab members, Mr Amsyari Morni and Miss Farhana Mazlan was sent to Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) for two weeks. The visit aimed to enable the exchange of knowledge and expertise between the researchers from Malaysia and QMUL in the United Kingdom. The research done was about the changes in insects diversity found in the guano pile from different depth level, sampled from Mulu cave, to assess the recent agricultural expansion on biodiversity and ecological function. Our counterpart in QMUL, Professor Dr Stephen Rossiter (a bats geneticist) and his apprentice, Dr Rosalind Drinkwater spent lots of time in discussing and brainstorming with Amsyari and Farhana on the Bioinformatics analyses. They also had been given the opportunity to get the firsthand experience on using the high-tech machines in QMUL laboratory. The visit had been a success as the sharing session goes well and the participants were able to gain lots of new knowledge and experiences in QMUL.

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Associate Professor Dr Faisal Ali Anwarali Khan for making this visit happened. Thanks to Professor Dr Stephen Rositter, Dr Rosalind Drinkwater and all Rositter's Lab members for their warm welcome. We also thanked Mdm Halipah Bujang and her team from the Research, Development & Innovation Division (RDID), Sarawak Forest Department for their kind helps in lending hands during the sampling activities.

We hope to have a continuous research collaboration with QMUL and RDID in the future.

#Bioinformatics #NewtonUngkuOmar