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We wanted to shine a spotlight on a special travel grant recipient from 2023, Jess Buddle. Jess has received our travel grant twice now for her work, with the most recent grant allowing her to attend Clostpath in Canada. Keep reading to see what Jess had to say.
"My name’s Jess Buddle, and I’m now officially (terrifyingly) in my 4th year of my PhD at the University of Sheffield. I work on vancomycin resistance in C. difficile, and after a wonderful NBUG conference experience using Don Whitley Scientific funding, I applied again…
Thanks to a further £250 travel contribution from Don Whitley Scientific, I was able to travel to Banff, Alberta, Canada to attend the 13th Clostpath meeting. Clostpath is a specialist conference covering all things Clostridia spp. - from molecular biology to mouse models and clinical disease. I was lucky enough to present a talk, and spoke about my first, first-author research paper, which had just been released as a pre-print. 
This was a fantastic opportunity to be able to not only talk about my work, but also to make people who are interested in Clostridia aware of our pre-print. This was greeted with great enthusiasm, and I got a lot of interest and questions from the audience, as well as people coming to chat with me
after my talk. Besides the talk, I had a fantastic time learning about all aspects of Clostridia, and the
standards of talks and posters were really high. It was great to meet PhD students with similar interests, and I made lots of new conference friends.
Overall, I had a fantastic time at Clostpath 13, and am really grateful for funding contributions from Don Whitley Scientific. Banff was the most beautiful location (in my opinion, ever (which is not very Yorkshire of me)), and I will be back there as soon as I can!"
CLOSTPATH 2023 Presentation.pdf
Good luck to Jess with her remaining time completing her PhD, we look forward to seeing what this bright student continues onto in the future. If you are interested in the DWS Travel Grant click the link for more information: Workstation Travel Grant | Don Whitley Scientific (dwscientific.com)
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