Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund report – Sofia Fausone (2024, Bioscience)

Thank you to the Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund for supporting my attendance at the QLife Quantitative Biology Spring School, hosted by the Ecole Normale Superieure in April. This week-long school was focused on cell dynamics of developing systems, with talks and workshops from experts spanning biology, physics, and computer science.

I am a first-year DPhil student on the Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP, and was in my first rotation in Theoretical physics. My project was on the physics of gastrulation, an important stage in embryo development that can be modeled as the deformation of an active surface. It also had a computational angle that involved quantifying the nematic alignment across light-sheet microscopy images of mouse embryos. The QLife school was an excellent introduction to new techniques – both theoretical and computational – that I can use once I start my DPhil project.

Each day, we had four lectures from scientists working on cell dynamics and development, and a three and a half hour practical session that introduced us to a particular modeling software pipeline. I found the one on three-dimensional cell segmentation in embryos especially interesting, and directly applicable to my project. For two of the days, we also had evening poster sessions where everyone in our cohort – about 25 of us – presented their work. I brought my poster on Physical Principles of Mammalian Gastrulation, and enjoyed discussing my work with peers while learning about theirs. There was a great array of different research being done, and it was an amazing chance to see how development can be studied from so many perspectives.

When I start my DPhil in the fall, I plan to go back to the bank of software and presentation slides provided by QLife and incorporate some of the technologies I was introduced to. Overall, it was a fantastic week of learning and discussing biophysics. Thank you to University College and the Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund.

Published: 25 July 2025

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