Seven UQ scientists were honoured with awards totalling almost $500,000 at a gala ceremony at the new UQ Centre tonight as part of the 2002 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards for early career researchers.
Now in their fourth year, the annual awards recognise outstanding performance and leadership potential, and this year formed part of the inaugural UQ Research Week from September 23–27.
UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hay congratulated all winners.
“The University’s research and research-training performance consistently rank between first and third among Australian universities on most readily available measures,” he said.
"The University’s research initiatives and achievements are playing a pre-eminent role in establishing Queensland as the 'Smart State'.
“UQ Research Week has highlighted some important projects and the UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards have introduced the work of some of our brightest young researchers.”
The winning researchers were:
• Dr Mark Blows from the School of Life Sciences for his work on sexual selection. Dr Blows’s study of the fly species Drosophilia serrata is showing that while females prefer males with strong male traits as fathers for their offspring, the effort of signalling leaves such males depleted. “The females want attractive males because attractiveness may have indicated that a male carried genes for high offspring fitness in the past, but now the genes carried by attractive males aren’t very good because of all the effort of signalling,” Dr Blows said. “That means the genes that make a male attractive, at the same time confer lower offspring fitness. It eventually leads to a balance between sexual and natural selection, as females still choose attractive males, but very attractive males have lower offspring fitness.”
• Dr Melissa Brown from the School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences is investigating the cellular and molecular effects of disrupting the function of the Breast Cancer One (or BRCA1) gene, one of several breast-cancer susceptibility genes isolated in the last decade. Around 10 percent of breast cancer cases are due to hereditary factors with up to half of these due to the abnormalities in BRCA1. Breast cancer affects approximately one in 11 women and every day in Australia, 25 women discover they have breast cancer. Currently in Australia, 100,000 women cope with breast cancer diagnoses. Dr Brown’s research is broadly divided into two main areas – investigating the triggers to switching the BRCA1 gene on and off and the actions of the gene’s protein product. She said her award funds would be used to explore some novel approaches to her research outside the bounds of the two National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants and one Queensland Cancer Fund (QCF) grant she currently holds.
• Dr Sean Grimmond and his colleague Rohan Teasdale at the Institute of Molecular Bioscience (IMB)’s Expression Genomics Laboratory are poised to unravel the invaluable secrets of the human genome and determine the biological functions of individual genes. “Now that the human genome is sorted, we are developing one of the first tools to make sense of how to use it,” Dr Grimmond said. His award will facilitate a collaboration with RIKEN researchers in Japan to mass-screen up to 10,000 human genes to determine which biological functions they control. This information will give insights to the cancer cycle and mammalian development in ways that can change modern medicine forever. It will build a library catalogue of the genes that make up the body, where they are located and the biological process they control – be it cell-growth, the cell cycle or cell-suicide.
• Associate Professor Paul Hodges from the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences is investigating the correlation between the nervous system dealing with multiple tasks, such as respiration and joint stability, and the risk factors for developing musculoskeletal pain and injury. “Muscles often perform multiple functions at the same time and the brain prioritises these tasks according to their relative importance, which means that the accuracy of joint stability often comes second and places the person at greater risk of injury,” he said. Dr Hodges plans to use his award funds to examine how the brain controls movement and alters with pain and what situations put people at greater risk of injury. “Musculoskeletal pain is the third-leading cause of health-care expenditure in Australia and spinal pain is the most common and expensive work-related injury in the developed world,” he said. “The identification of risk factors for back pain, particularly for those suffering from asthma and urinary incontinence, will help develop guidelines for injury prevention and provide new strategies for rehabilitation, thereby improving patient outcomes.”
• Dr Eugene Jak of the Pyrometallurgy Research Centre (PYROSEARCH) is leading a project to provide a mathematical description of the chemical and physical behaviours of molten oxides. His award will fund a project drawing on his world-leading research on phase equilibria in molten oxide systems using experimental and mathematical modelling techniques. According to Dr Jak, while the behaviour of molten oxides (slags) plays a crucial role in high-temperature metal and mineral processing, not much is known of the internal structure of these silicate systems at the atomic level. A greater understanding of slag properties could have major benefits for a range of industries such as metal- and mineral- extraction, coal, glass and ceramics. The knowledge could be used to increase metal and mineral yields, reduce waste, save energy and possibly develop new types of processes in metal-extraction.
• Dr Andrew Neal from the Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology will use his award to develop a computer program aimed at maintaining Australia’s high air-safety standards. The software uses data such as traffic volume and complexity to predict the average time an air-traffic controller needs to identify and avert potential conflict between aircraft. Potential uses include workload-assessment and prediction-management by airspace management systems world-wide and assessment of safety issues associated with “free flight”, a proposal put forward by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. Dr Neal is one of a team of University psychologists and computer scientists working with scientists from Defence Research and Development Canada. He said controllers worked from computer screens showing aircraft in assigned sectors, monitoring and directing traffic to maintain a safe, orderly and efficient flow. This included observing separation standards requiring aircraft to maintain minimum vertical and horizontal distances from each other. “Our program will predict the average time air-traffic controllers will take to identify conflict, that is breaches of separation standards,” he said. “This will help in making judgements on the number of aircraft a controller can safely handle at one time.”
• Dr Tim Ralph and his colleagues in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Centre for Quantum Computer Technology at UQ are at the cutting-edge in developing the next generation of computers, quantum computers, using particles of light instead of silicon chips. Quantum computers offer a solution to the “brick wall” confronting scientists in their drive towards ever-smaller chips. Current technology is thought to run into fundamental physical barriers (size and cost) around the year 2010. Researchers are looking at a way forward by building computers at the level of single atoms and single electrons, using quantum physics rather than everyday physics and electronics. By exploiting properties of quantum information, quantum computers make many attempts to solve hard problems at the same time, allowing calculations in a matter of seconds which now take weeks to achieve.
Media: News releases and videos on the winners are available via the website at: www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek/
For more information, contact Jan King (telephone 07 3365 1120) or Shirley Glaister (telephone 07 3365 2339) at UQ Communications.
