Congratulations to Tess McCann on successful viva voce

Tess McCann successfully passes her PhD viva - the third Tissue Repair Doctor.

Many congratulations to Dr Tess McCann for successfully passing her viva!

During her PhD Tess investigated signalling pathways during spinal cord neuroregeneration in zebrafish in the labs of Prof Becker (Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences) and Prof Wilson (MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine). Unlike mammals, zebrafish have repair mechanisms that allow functional recovery after a spinal cord lesion.

Tess was using both larval and adult zebrafish to study different signalling pathways that play a role in neuroregeneration after a spinal cord injury. Her studies have identified a number of drug compounds that are able to alter the numbers of motor neurons after a lesion. Tess also made transgenic zebrafish which allowed her to specifically upregulate signalling pathways in the progenitors within the spinal cord. For her research Tess was using a range of techniques, including zebrafish husbandry, drug treatment assays, histology, immunohistochemistry and imaging.