Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) researchers and students from multiple centres, including the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research (PGJCCR), came together for this year’s Irish Association for Cancer Research (IACR) conference in Belfast’s Europa Hotel from 5^th to 8^th March.

The IACR’s aim to advance cancer research across the island of Ireland took a big step in the right direction as leading experts met with upcoming early-career researchers to discuss how patient survival might be improved, diagnoses made earlier, how personal impacts of cancer can be lessened and how the disease can be better prevented.

We caught up with some of the many participants from across QUB for a quick photo and celebration with the prizewinners including PGJCCR’s Dr Claudia Hamilton who won Best Breakthrough Cancer Research Presentation and the School of Pharmacy’s Dr Chayanika Saha (both pictured below left) who took home the title of EACR Prize Winner – Senior Investigator.

 

 

The conference’s first day was organised by the IACR Junior Council and was topped off with the Patrick Johnston Award in which members of the public were invited to join a judging panel to have their say on how clearly new work was communicated with the public. QUB researchers took part in a poster presentation followed by a session of oral talks, including PGJCCR’s Micheal Ryan (below left), Nikita Lewis (below centre), Shauna McClelland (below right), and Dr David Burke (above right).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were also proffered talks from researchers across QUB’s PGJCCR, School of Pharmacy and Centre for Public Health (CPH) including Professor Nick Orr, Dr Timothy O’Brien, Dr Letitia Mohamed-Smith, Dr Natalie Fisher, Dr Lauren McVicker, Dr Syed Umbreen, Dr Charlene McShane, Dr Una McMenamin, Erin McGrattan, Dr Claudia Hamilton and Dr Lanshan Huang (pictured below with Dr Emma Allott and Jack Murphy).