News

Some of us made it out to the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Christmas Party last week. A fun time was had by all! Looking forward to this holiday season and celebrating everyone's accomplishments from the past year. 

Dr. Britz had a great experience attending the LACE 2023 conference in Mexico earlier this month. It was a great excuse to also meet up with some of our Mexican collaborators to discuss our ongoing research projects and discuss future research opportunities. A special thanks to Dr. Miguel Cruz and his research group for being such kind and gracious hosts.

From our lab group to yours, we wish you a happy holidays and all the best in 2024! 

The Britz group would like to extend a warm welcome to 2 new lab members joining our research group. José Bozelli joins us from the Biochemistry department here at McMaster. His extensive experience in lipid research is going to be a great addition to our group as we extend our capabilities beyond only metabolomics. João Victor Pimenta is joining us from Brazil. He is a visiting graduate students who will be staying with us for the next 7 months! His work involves the characterization of coffee beans, where he is trying to map their origin based on their distinct differences. Welcome to the Britz Group!

A massive congratulations to Tommy, who we had the opportunity to host on a research stay in 2022 on his recent Nature publication. We know how hard you have been working towards this publication. In his work Tommy conducted a multi-omics study comprising three generations of family members to investigate the early development of the gut microbiota. We are honoured to be featured in this work! Want to check it out? See the link below.

Comparative characterization of the infant gut microbiome and their maternal lineage by a multi-omics approach

Many congratulations to all the Chemistry and Chemical Biology undergraduate students who defended their thesis yesterday. A special shout-out to Haley and Victoria, two students who completed their work in our research group. We hope you both gained experience and analytical knowledge that will set you up for success in the future. 

We would be remiss not to also mention Esther and Yasmin who also completed research projects in our research group this academic year. The pleasure was ours getting to walk alongside all four of you as you undertook your respective independent research project. 

We had a great time last week at the 5th annual Canadian Metabolomics Conference hosted at the University of British Columbia. It was great to catch up with our fellow Canadian metabolomic researchers. An added bonus was the BC mountain range as our backdrop for this conference.

A major congratulations to Zach, our research assistant, who won 2nd place for his oral presentation titled "A method for comprehensive drug surveillance of clinically depressed patients by multisegment injection-capillary eletrophoresis-mass spectrometry"!

Ana attended the CREST (Current Research in Engineering, Health Sciences and Technology) conference this past Saturday, here at McMaster. She had a great time and was able to share a poster where she presented her ongoing research in biomarker discovery of burn injuries. Many thanks to the WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) initiative for hosting this conference. 

We are thrilled to finally announce that one of this years prestigious Vanier recipients is our lab assistant Zach. We are beyond excited for him as he begins his PhD in our research group. Zach started in the Britz-McKibbin group in 2017, completing his undergraduate thesis requirement before starting his current role as research assistant in 2019. This award includes the highest recognitions of his accomplishments and leadership abilities. Many congratulations as you begin working towards finding biochemical insights into early exposures associated with childhood obesity!

Celebrating excellence in Canadian research: Announcing recipients of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships

We would like to congratulate Patricia, one of our masters students who received a travel award for oral presentation that took place in the Biomedical Mass Spectrometry symposium at CSC (Canadian Chemistry Conference) in Winnipeg last week! Her talk focused on lipidomic studies on dried blood spot extracts for early detection of cystic fibrosis in newborns.

And just like that, another student successfully defended their PhD thesis. Congratulations to Dr. Erick Helmeczi who defended yesterday. Erick's work focused on developing new screening tools for Vitamin D deficiency, particularly for children in the ICU. Recent work has shown worse health outcomes for deficient children, setting the stage for Erick's work.

He also developed new software tools to help streamline our data workflow. Specifically he developed PeakMeister, a new data processing tool to help automate data pre-processing when performing multisegment injection-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (MSI-CE-MS). Historically data pre-processing has been the most time-consuming and cumbersome step of our workflow, but not anymore thanks to Erick's contributions. 

Check our McMaster's most recent Daily News blog where our research assistant Zach was featured congratulating him on his Vanier award. We look forward to him starting his PhD in Jan. 2025!

McMaster celebrates six new Vanier Scholars

Dr. Britz very much enjoyed his time at the Metabolomics Society Conference last week, which was hosted in Osaka Japan! There he presented on Erick's PhD work assessing treatment responses to a single large bolus dose of cholecalciferol in vitamin D deficient critically ill children.

We wanted to highlight a recent podcast that one of our group members participated in. Thanks Sandi for your candid conversation about your interests in metabolomic epidemiology and childhood obesity. Check out the podcast using the link below!

Metabolomic epidemiology & childhood obesity

We are thrilled to welcome three new graduate students to our research group as well as four new undergrad students.

Welcome to Zaineb, Liam, and Mariana, our three newest graduate students. Also welcome to Christy, Caitlyn, Zachary, and Malina who will be completing research projects with us during this academic year. 

We can't wait to see everything you will accomplish.