As we welcome the New Year of 2025, we are excited to introduce two new colleagues, Rachel and Shiqi, who have joined us as research assistants! Their main focus will be on sentinel surveillance of acute diarrhoea cases in Singapore. Welcome, Rachel and Shiqi!
Rachel (they both love cat🐈)
Shiqi (they both love cat🐈)
We have another new colleague in our group - Ming Guang, will join us as research assistant! Ming Guang’s main focus of work will be phage isolation. Alongside with that, he will also help with the recruitment of volunteers for our SIR project, welcome Ming Guang!
We have new Senior Research Fellow in our lab @ NUS - Adrian officially joins us and will be working on developing culturomics pipeline, particularly anaerobes. Welcome Adrian!
The Boucher team was recently credited for a new family - the Paracoccaceae!
This splits the Rhodobacteceae into two families: Roseobacteraceae and Paracoccaceae.
All the details are described in depth here.
We were in Bangladesh recently to conduct a series of samplings across various villages, testing water and sewage tanks in order to gauge the impact of cholera across the nation.
The game Lockdown! which was co-developed by both Dr. Yann Boucher and Dr. Anna Szucs, was featured on the Singapore Board Game Design website via an interview of both Dr. Boucher and Dr. Szucs!
The article focuses primarily on the game’s mechanics, as well as our motivations for developing the board game throughout the course of the pandemic.
We will have new colleague in our group very soon - Xiu Qi will join us as research assistant! She will help with culturomics project for gut microbiome bacteria, welcome Xiu Qi!
Yann’s first student, Paul Kirchberger, has begun a new faculty position at Oklahoma State University in the department of microbiology and biotechnology. His lab focuses on developing bacteriophages from genomic parts in nature, as well as in understanding the factors that affect viral genomes (and vice versa).
Visit his lab website at https://kirchberger-lab.okstate.edu!
Our very own Lockdown! has been selected as a representative of well-designed card games and reviewed by Dr. Tjaša Kermavnar and Prof. Pieter Desmet from Faculty of industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
They conducted a review of COVID-19-themed games providing a concise overview of the diversity of COVID-19-themed games to inform and inspire readers who are interested in developing serious games for future pandemics and other large-scale crises, such as wartime and natural disasters. The review entitled ‘Games for COVID-19: A need-based exploration of gamified interventions’ was published in Base Design and Innovation Magazine. Excited to know this!
Do have a read at the review!
“Visually appealing games like Lockdown! can fulfil the players’ need for beauty through aesthetic game elements”
If you haven’t gotten your hands on Lockdown!, click here to order now!
Deborah just arrived in Singapore last two weeks and will join us as the first PhD student after the lab moves to Singapore! Welcome Deborah!
