Successful PhD transfer, lab and website relocation!
We have moved!
It has been a while since the Madsen Lab last shared an update — and a lot has happened (beyond the new website look!). We have now successfully relocated to the CRUK Scotland Institute and the University of Glasgow.
This was a major undertaking and could not have happened without the entire team of PhD students and our new postdoc, Dr Robert Vander Velde. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with such thoughtful, resilient and generous people, who handled months of uncertainty with professionalism and grace.
Well done, Alex!
Against the backdrop of this transition, Alex travelled back to Dundee to defend her first-year PhD progress as part of the formal transfer process — and she absolutely nailed it.
I am so proud of you, Alex!
Some PhD projects are narrow and technically contained. Yours is not. In less than nine months, you have learned complex computational pipelines, implemented deep learning models, refined your hypotheses and mapped out a clear strategy for integrating future datasets. You have immersed yourself in the complexities of PI3K signalling and the very real joys (and frustrations!) of working with human pluripotent stem cells — all while dealing with infrastructure delays that were completely outside your control and a lab relocation across cities.
The fact that elements of your work are already feeding into manuscripts speaks volumes!
Why interdisciplinarity matters
Today was also a reminder that ambitious, integrative science can sometimes look unfamiliar in traditional settings.
When projects combine computation, signalling biology, lineage context and modelling, they can appear broad from the outside. But that breadth is not vagueness — it is architecture. It is the structure required to answer complex biological questions properly.
Science is moving towards integration, team-based problem solving and context-aware models. That is exactly what we are building in the Madsen Lab, and it is exactly what my UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship was designed to support: ambitious, collaborative, future-facing research.
So to the whole team — keep going. If your project occasionally feels slightly different from the rest of the room, that may simply mean you are working at the edge of where the field is heading.
And I couldn’t be prouder of that.
