Meet the Artists

Andrew McAinsh

Adele Marston

Muriel Erent

Muriel Erent is the Laboratory Manager in Andrew McAinsh team at the Warwick Medical School. Her role is to coordinate the day-to-day operations and support a wide variety of research projects, including human cell biology and reproductive science with the common theme of chromosome inheritance in cells.

The making of the tile was a great experience. It is a great way to introduce scientific ideas to a wide audience and talk to patients about why the donations are so precious to us. 

Nigel Burroughs

Nigel Burroughs is a Professor at the Warwick Mathematics Institute. His main interests are in using mathematics and statistical methods to understand biological and medical phenomena. His lab collaborates with McAinsh group on investigating chromosome behaviour during cell division, including during oocyte maturation processes and early embryonic divisions in humans.

Gerard Pieper

Gerard is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology. He studies how DNA is accurately segregated in frog and human egg cells.

It was very fun to get to work with glass and to translate my day to day to work into “art”. It came out much better than I expected. As scientists, we are quite far removed from the patient experience and this project was a good opportunity to get a better understanding of what fertility patients go through. 

Geraldine Hartshorne

Geraldine holds the joint position focused on academic research and improvement of clinical IVF service. She has broad interests across the field of reproductive medicine, developed over a 40 year career, starting in Cambridge with a PhD under Professor Bob Edwards in the 1980s. Geraldine has developed key expertise in female fertility, meiosis and oocyte function. She advises patients and colleagues regarding embryo development and bespoke treatment plans and facilitates access to clinical resources for research.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the creativity of the ART project.  The tiles we made have been visually pleasing as well as a great discussion point to make contact with people at conferences or other public settings.  We have even had people wanting to buy our pieces!  Overall, quite an eye-opener for me.

Dr Cerys Currie is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warwick, with Coventry Centre for Reproductive Medicine. 

Making the glass art was so much fun, and I love using the pieces to help explain our research to members of the public. They are always a favourite!

Aleksandra is currently a third year PhD student in Warwick Medical School, supervised by Professors Andrew McAinsh and Geraldine Hartshorne. She works with human eggs and embryos, and her main research interest is meiosis, which is the cell division that forms gametes (oocytes and sperm). Aleksandra is looking into how this process is completed in human oocytes, and what can cause it to go wrong, mostly focusing on the effect of advanced female age on egg quality.

I really enjoyed taking part in this public engagement project, not only creating the glass piece, but also talking to people about it afterwards! The glass art is an amazing tool to connect with the audience, and a great visual that helps to engage in conversations about science.

Constandina Koki

Constandina is a postdoctoral research fellow in Nigel’s Burrough’s group, funded by Wellcome Trust. Currently the Burrough group are developing and applying Bayesian computational methods for statistical analysis of spatial dynamics in human eggs. The group is collaborating with Andrew McAinsh’s lab in Warwick Medical School (WMB). Furthermore, the group are contributing in a project along with Siobhan Quenby in Biomedical Sciences (WMB) and the NHS, for human recurrent miscarriage.

Alex Pegg

Alex Pegg completed the second half of her Masters program in reproductive sciences in the Marston lab where she was investigating how Meikin impacts kinetochore structure. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen investigating chromosome mis-segregation in human and mouse eggs. Once Alex finishes her PhD, she would like to continue working with eggs, either in a post-doc or in a clinical setting.

Mansour Aboelenain

Mansour is a Postdoc Researcher at Wellcome Centre of Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh and Associate professor of Animal reproduction in Mansoura University, Egypt. His area of research involved working with oocytes and embryos from different animal models as mouse and bovine. This research started in Hokkaido University, Japan and Rutgers University, USA before moving to Edinburgh. Now, Mansour has a great opportunity to expand his area of research with human oocytes and embryos focusing on chromosome segregation errors research.

David Mola