Stewart and Pitt Research Groups
sjp24 Quenton Hurst (PhD student; Pitt group) joins the SCF Board as an early career member. The ECR committee are responsible for SCF social media updates, sharing news on exciting cardiovascular research, contributing to the organisation of SCF annual conferences and connecting fellow CVD researchers.
Congratulations Quenton!
The Scottish Cardiovascular Forum Annual meeting was held in Edinburgh February 2025.
Boyang Lin (Stewart Group) gave a talk titled “Assessing the Association between Plasma Metal Ion Levels and Cardiovascular Health: A Comparative Analysis Using Electronic Health Records from the Scottish Population.
Quenton Hurst (Pitt group) gave a poster presentation titled “The Role of MG23 in Dox Induced Cardiac Dysfunction”
Xueyu Guo (Pitt group) gave a poster presentation titled “Analysis of TMEM109 rare genetic variation underlying cardiovascular diseases and traits
among 500,000 individuals in the UK Biobank”
Jothi Kumar (Pitt group) gave a poster titled “Fluorescence microscopy approaches to monitor cell-to-cell heterogeneity in the regulation of cardiomyocyte contractility”
Abbi Crichton (Pitt group) gave a poster titled “Doxorubicin Modulates Mitsugumin 23 driving altered cellular Ca2+ dynamics and contractility in vascular smooth muscle”
Was great to see a large St Andrews cardiovascular presence at this meeting!
Samantha Pitt & Malcolm White (Biology) were awarded a BBSRC research grant to study MCpol and the CrAMPs: Probing the ancestry and diversity
of CRISPR immunity.
On 13 November 2024, the School of Medicine hosted the Tenovus Tayside and Northeast Fife Symposium. The event was organised by Reader and Cellular Medicine Division Head Dr Samantha Pitt, who is also a Tenovus Scotland local scientific advisory committee member.
The symposium showcased the impressive range of research from the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews made possible by Tenovus through oral and poster presentations by PhD students and early career researchers. From cardiovascular science to cancer, each project approached an issue of great clinical relevance from a new perspective.
Dr Ify Mordi, Clinical Senior Lecturer and British Heart Foundation Intermediate Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, delivered a keynote talk entitled, ‘The importance of what we can’t see – Small vessels in cardiovascular disease.’
Alongside the formal presentations, the symposium offered a valuable opportunity for PhD, early-career, and established researchers to connect at the closing reception. This provided an ideal environment for attendees to discuss collaboration opportunities, share new findings, and seek guidance from those at a later career stage
Samantha Pitt has recently accepted an invitation to join the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) Fellowships Committee. The committee meets four times a year to assess applications for PhD studentships, basic science research and clinical research fellowships.
Congratulations to Katie Abraham on winning a poster prize at SCF 2023. Katie presented a poster titled “Does Mitsugumin 23 play a role in doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity”. Katie was a recipient of a Physiological Springboard summer studentship to carry out a summer project in the Pitt lab in 2022. This was Katie’s first conference and she certainly did it in style.
The Pitt lab would like to thank Dr Fiona Murray University of Aberdeen for organising such an exciting meeting focused on early career researchers.
Samantha Pitt gave a keynote lecture at the 45 Annual Meeting of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan in Tokyo Dec 2022.
This was a very exciting meeting and Sam would like to thank Prof Toshi Fukada for his kind invitation to attend this meeting.
Samantha Pitt has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB).
The Royal Society of Biology works to facilitate the promotion of new discoveries in biological science for national and international benefit, and to engage the wider public with the work of the Society.
For election as a Fellow an individual needs to have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of the biological sciences and gained no less than five years’ experience in a position of senior responsibility.
Dr Samantha Pitt has just been awarded a 3 year BHF project grant to investigate how zinc regulates diastolic calcium leak to drive cardiac dysfunction. This award will enable the talented Amy Dorward to continue her work in this area as a PDRA. The project will use a combination of electrophysiology, molecular biology and cutting-edge microscopy techniques (supervised by Dr Juan Varela, School of Biology) to understand the intrinsic relationship between cardiac cellular Zn2+ and Ca2+-dynamics in the failing heart.
We would like to thank the BHF for their continued support of our research.
Dr Samantha Pitt has been elected as President-Elect for the International Society for Zinc Biology (ISZB). The ISZB brings together scientists from around the world in a diversity of fields with a common interest in the structural, biochemical, genetic and physiological aspects of zinc biology. She will serve in this position for 2 years before moving to the role of President of the society in 2023.