On Friday 17th April, we had great fun holding an opening event for our £8.4m MRC-funded CLIMB project and facility at Warwick Medical School.

You can access a YouTube video of the first half of the event here:

The event kicked off with me providing a brief introduction to the project and stressing the achievements so far:

• spending millions of pounds on bioinformatics infrastructure within a single financial year (£3.7m on computers across the four participating universities; £0.7m on building work at Warwick and >£1m at Swansea)
• getting all the procurement, purchase orders, invoices, building etc through our university systems
• recruiting excellent support staff and academic staff to the project
• getting the building work finished (an end to all that noise!)

I then introduced our three guest speakers:

• Stanley Falkow, godfather of the field of bacterial pathogenesis, skyping in from Stanford and immortalised in our glasswork with his quote “Never met a microbe I didn’t like”
• Randal Keynes, great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin
• Jon Chase, aka OortKuiper, science rapper.

Read more about the opening over at the University of Warwick Microbial Underground blog.