Fellow honours
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| Smart State fellows (from left) Dr Capini, Associate Professor Boyd and Dr Mabbett |
UQ’s reputation as one of Australia's leading research institutions has been further enhanced by the latest announcements of both Federaation and Smart State Fellowships.
Professor of Visual Neuroscience at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, Mandyam Srinivasan, will lead a $2.5 million project aiming to improve robot technology, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), through better understanding of bee behaviour. Professor Srinivasan has won a $1.25 million 2007 Smart State Premier’s Fellowship, which is matched by funding from UQ. His team has spent more than two decades unlocking the mysteries of bee vision and navigation, and is now investigating how bee emotions, particularly aggression, can improve robotics.
Dr Ming Wei, from UQ’s School of Medicine, has been awarded the Dr Jian Zhou Smart State Fellowship for Immunology and Cancer Research, worth $750,000 over three years. The Fellowship, made up of $300,000 each from the Queensland Government and UQ as well as $150,000 from CSL Limited, honours the late Dr Jian Zhou, co-founder, with Professor Ian Frazer, of the world’s first cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil®. Dr Wei will use the Fellowship to design a bacterium to target lung cancer cells. His research is based on manipulating the genes of a special type of bacteria found in the Eastern Grey Kangaroo, cattle, soils and humans. The anaerobic bacteria does not need oxygen to multiply and can therefore spread much faster than tumour cells, effectively starving them out.
This is their natural tumour-killing ability. On top of this, Dr Wei’s team will engineer the bacteria to take genes encoding other killing mechanisms including tumour-specifc toxins, dsRNA and single-stranded RNAs for gene-silencing and immunostimulations into the tumour. Dr Wei said it was in this way that the bacteria acted as a “Trojan horse”. Dr Wei said the research could be applied to up to 90 percent of known solidtumour cancers, including melanomas. The Dr Jian Zhou Smart State Fellowship for Cancer and Immunology Research is part of Round Two of the Smart State Innovation Funds.
A scientist who helped discover the gene that determines sex in mammals is one of three UQ researchers who have received one of the highest academic accolades in Australia. Professor Peter Koopman, from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, was named an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at a ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra.
UQ garnered three Federation Fellows out of the 20 announced, making a total of 16 at the University. Two current Federation Fellows, Professor Gerard Milburn and Professor John Quiggin, each won second Federation Fellowships in recognition of their exceptional research in the fields of quantum physics (Milburn) and economic risk-modelling (Quiggin).
Federation Fellows are considered world leaders in their chosen fields of research and the program is aimed at attracting some of the world’s best research talent as well as offering opportunities for top Australian researchers to continue their work here. Professor Koopman said his research was looking to develop and use new and vastly more efficient ways of identifying which of our 30,000 genes were important for embryonic development.
Professor Koopman is world-renowned in the field of developmental biology, and was part of a team that discovered the gene that determines sex in mammals, hailed as one of the most important biological discoveries of last century.
Professor Milburn, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computer Technology, is researching quantum nanoscience to develop design principles, based on quantum theory. The principles underlie new nano-scale devices, particularly quantum electromechanical systems (QEMS) with applications to electronics, nanooptics, metrology and biology.
Professor Quiggin, from UQ’s Schools of Economics and Political Science and International Relations, is analysing options for adaptation to climate change in Australia, and in particular, the role and management of uncertainty, focusing on the Great Barrier Reef and the Murray–Darling Basin.
UQ scientists have won Smart State Fellowships to continue groundbreaking research on rheumatoid arthritis, cerebral palsy and a hospital superbug. The researchers, Associate Professor Roslyn Boyd, Dr Christelle Capini and Dr Amanda Mabbett, have each received a $150,000 Queensland Government Fellowship for their three-year projects.
Dr Boyd, a paediatric physiotherapist, will oversee a $2.25 million cerebral palsy research project mostly funded by a $1.8 million Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation donation with support from UQ and Queensland Health.
Dr Mabbett is researching new ways to tackle the antibiotic resistant superbug Staphylococcus aureus, or golden staph, which kills thousands of hospital patients each year. Dr Mabbett, a researcher in the laboratory of Associate Professor Mark Schembri in UQ’s School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences, said her aim was to disrupt the biofilm growth of golden staph. Biofilms are a collection of cells working as a community that enable the superbug to spread on medical devices.
Dr Capini is working on a new therapy that could improve treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. She is a researcher in the Dendritic Cell Biology group at the UQ Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine.
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| Building a bacterial "Trojan horse" ... Dr Wei | Hive of activity ... Professor Srinivasan at the QBI |
