Today, 9th October, marks a remarkable milestone: Philip Cohen has been a principal investigator in Dundee for exactly 55 years.

Philip and Tricia arrived on 9th October 1971, spending their first night at Peter Garland’s house in Perth. Apparently the temperature fell to 9°F that night, prompting him to wonder why he had signed the contract. Fortunately for Dundee, he stayed.

Warm congratulations to Kei Sakamoto, who has just delivered his prize lecture at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes Annual Meeting in Milan, having been awarded the 2026 EASD–Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence by the Novo Nordis

Congratulations to Jessica Rowe, a PhD student in Kirby Swatek’s lab, for winning one of three UbiQ-sponsored poster prizes at the recent EMBO conference on Ubiquitin and Ubiquitin-like Proteins in Health and Disease in Monopoli, Italy.

Dr Esther Sammler, Group Leader in the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU) at the University of Dundee and Honorary Consultant Neurologist at NHS Tayside, has received the prestigious 2026 Tom Isaacs Award.

A new newsletter created by MRC PPU PhD students Rose Francis and Chloe Flitton is helping to make Parkinson’s research more accessible to those with lived experience of Parkinson’s.

Today, the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU) officially welcomed its 2026 cohort of PhD students to the Unit.

The new students were welcomed by third-year PhD student and MRC PPU PhD Student Representative, Sadik Elshani; MRC PPU General Manager, Dr Monika Zwirek; and MRC PPU PhD Programme Lead, Professor Gopal Sapkota.

A new study led by the Sapkota Lab, in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Neuroscience Discovery, has demonstrated that targeted protein degradation can selectively eliminate endogenous α-synuclein and suppress its pathological aggregation.

Two PhD students from the Madsen Lab at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU), Oliwia Mruk and Alexandra Musk, have developed optimised workflows for generating arterial- and venous-like endothelial cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

Dr Anna Pérez i Ràfols has received a prestigious five-year Wellcome Early-Career Award to establish an ambitious research programme investigating the molecular signals that protect cells under stress.

Everyone at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU) is delighted to congratulate our former colleague, Professor Kei Sakamoto, on being awarded the 2026 Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Ex