30 April 2015

Sebastien Gagneux, of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, will give a College seminar in the College lecture theatre at 6.00 pm on Monday the 4th of May on the Origin and Future of Human Tuberculosis.  The poster of the seminar can be downloaded here and all interested participanrts are welcome.

This seminar is the first of a series of four devoted to Modern and Ancient Plagues (malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and Ebola).

Tuberculosis is one of the infectious diseases that have shaped the destiny of our species and recent sequence data from the Gagneux and several other laboratories have have shed light on the co-evolution of the pathogen and its host. The same studies offer a basis for countering the emergence of drug-resistant strains of M tuberculosis and their impact on current and future disease pattern and distribution.

27 April 2015

‘A victory sweaty but deserved’ in the words of Delaram Farzin, College yr 2 undergraduate in Pharmaceutical Sciences, member of the Volta Students’ Union (VSU) executive and one of the organisers of the College team together with Beatrice Lena, MSc student in Physics and a number of other Volta undergraduates and graduates . Delaram’s words sealed the victory of Collegio A Volta in the 2014/15 edition of the Intercollegiate Treasure Hunt, an event that attracts interest and passion among students of all University Colleges in Pavia and constitutes a celebration of Collegiate life and spirit.

The College warmly congratulates its students for this new achievement that puts, once more, Collegio A Volta on the map and in the news.

Image: The team of Volta students who won the 2014/15 edition of the Intercollegiate Treasure Hunt.

20 April 2015

Collegio Ghislieri and the University of Pavia have promoted a lecture series on recent progress on our understanding of cancer and the new prospects for therapy that such progress enables.  Topics will include molecular analysis of selected cancer, metastasis, new strategis for harnessing the immune system in the fight against cancer and haematopoiesis.  The poster of the lecture series can be downloaded here.  All College students, notably students in Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Medicine are strongly encouraged to attend.

13 April 2015

College postgraduate medical student Carmelo Sgarlata will give the second seminar of his Practical Medical Skills series on the 22nd of April in the College lecture theatre at 6.30 pm.The poster of the series can be downloaded here.

The seminar will tackle the applications of ultrasound in Medicine and, in line with the scope of this series, it will offer both a discussion of trhe basic principles and instrumentation as well as a hands on approach. All interested students, from College and outside, are welcome to attend, especially of course all medical students of three and six year Courses.

Carmelo Sgarlata studied Medicine at Volta as an undergraduate graduating in July 2012.  He remained in residence afterward as a postgraduate medical student in Diseases of the Elderly.  He was secretary of the Volta Medical Society throughout the academic year 2013/14.

Image: A longitudinal wave depicting the progression of ultrasound from source  (from Jacaranda Physics 1 2nd Edition © John Wiley & Sons, Inc).

11 April 2015

Zoe Marks, Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Edinburgh will give the third lecture of The African Exodus series on Monday the 20th of April at 6.00 pm in the College lecture theatre.  The lecture, entitled Conflict and Peace in Africa will address the role of conflict as major causes of the recent African exodus and the prospects for peace across the African continent

The poster of the lecture can be downloaded here. All interested people are welcome to attend.

 

 

11 April 2015

The College is well aware that its website is the best way to reach other academic communities and prospective students across the world and Volta is proud of the fact that its web site is visited extensively from most countires in the world (see image).  China was a notable exception to this pattern until recently with relatively few viisitors compared to other countries but this may well be about to change.  In March 2015 the Volta website was accessed 22 times from China and this trend is continuing and strenghtening in April.  Volta welcomes this increased interest from China and encourages prospective applications for College placements from Chinese undergraduate and graduate students.

The USA and the UK are the foreign countries that top the league in terms of access to the Volta website and are followed by Brasil, Spain, Germany and India. Visitors from Ireland spend the longest time on our site, accessing on average 18 pages per visit.  55% of Volta online visitors have Italian as the language set by their operating system, 43% have another language.  Visitors with English as their default language are 23% (French 7%, German 3%, Spanish 3%).

 

10 April 2015

Hartmut Niemann, a lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, will discuss new studies unveiling the mechanism by which H pylori adheres to the mucosa of the stomach. H pylori is a bacterium that inhabits the stomach of the majority of human beings but is also a major cause of ulcer and cancer of the stomach worldwide.

The seminar will take place in the Unit of Immunology and General Pathology (Golgi/Spallanzani Institute) on the 10th of April at 2.00 pm. The  poster of the seminar can be downloaded here.

College students reading Biology, Medicine and Biotechnology are strongly encouraged to attend.

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