Please join us for the fourth and final seminar in the Hilary Term series. This week’s Speakers will be:
Chair: Alex Lau-Zhu
Tea Ghigo – Painting the past in the 19th century: Materials, methods and perspectives in watercolour replicas.
Jack Flower – Utilising patient-derived organoids to untangle colon cancer pathogenesis and immunogenicity.
About the speakers:
Tea Ghigo is a Heritage Scientist specialising in the material analysis of museum collections. Her passion for this field began during her Master’s, where she researched painting materials from 15th-century Spain. Her PhD focused on Late Antique Egyptian writing inks, studying collections at the Vatican Library and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, among others. She then worked as a Research Heritage Scientist at the Ashmolean Museum, examining 19th-century watercolours and oil paintings. In 2023, she joined UCL as a Lecturer in the History of Art, Materials, and Technology.
Tea’s current research examines collections of 19th-century replicas produced in different contexts and aims to explore whether the artists attempted to use historically-inspired materials when painting historical subjects. She will present the results of material analyses of several objects, and contextualised them with information on technical sources and pigment catalogues. Ultimately, her contribution will explore different questions, such as:
– how were the materials for the replicas chosen?
– besides the price of painting materials, were other factors influencing artistic practices?
– how did the interplay between tradition and innovation influence the outcome?
Jack Flower graduated from the University of Birmingham with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Biomedical Science before studying MSc Cancer at University College London in 2020/21. Now, he is a fourth-year DPhil Cancer Science student working within the Department of Oncology in Headington and affiliated with the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences. As a member of Professor Simon Buczacki’s Tumour Evolution and Cell Identity research group, his work utilises patient-derived organoid models to explore the tumour immune-microenvironment in Colon Cancer and the factors influencing tumour immunogenicity.
Colon Cancer is the third most common and second deadliest cancer worldwide, often diagnosed when it’s spread to other places in the body. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy have limited effectiveness in these advanced cases, but immunotherapy has been recently approved which improves the body’s immune system to fight cancer for us. This has fewer side effects and actually had some success in curing some patients. However, only a limited number of patients are eligible for immunotherapy due to their cancer’s genetic characteristics and many immunotherapy-treated patients still don’t respond. Is there a better way to predict if someone will respond? Can we make immunotherapy available to all Colon Cancer patients? To answer these questions Jack’s presentation will try to understand the factors that determine a cancer’s ability to interact with the immune system.