University of Queensland researchers studying subjects as diverse as sunscreens for fish, young people and mobile phones, to how babies understand themselves to be human have been recognised in this year’s UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards.
Ten leading UQ researchers will be honoured with grants totalling $655,000 at a gala ceremony at the UQ Centre tonight (Thursday, September 23) as part of the awards for early-career researchers.
Now in their sixth year, the annual awards recognise outstanding performance and leadership potential, and form part of UQ Research Week (September 20–24).
UQ Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor David Siddle congratulated the winners and commended the diversity of their research.
This year`s winning researchers studied fields including the next generation of nanostructures; how young people have embraced mobile telephones and the internet; getting a better understanding of kidney diseases; how fish make their own sunscreen; quantum cryptography to make banking transactions safer; a new method to evaluate big commercial investments; ways to halt chronic liver disease; developing new anti-viral drugs for HIV; tracking chemical runoff in our oceans; and discovering what it means to be human for babies.
Professor Siddle said the UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards were among a range of initiatives created by the University to foster and nurture exciting research projects.
"Awards such as these are designed to foster the next generation of quality researchers," he said.
"This year’s winners were part of a hotly contested field. The quality and diversity of their research augurs well for the University."
Professor Siddle said the University`s research and research-training performance consistently ranked in the top three among Australian universities on widely-accepted measures. UQ researchers competed favourably with the world`s best in many areas.
He said as part of its research strategy, the University had invested significant sums in key projects and had been able to attract matching financial support from government and external donors.
This approach has been extremely fruitful, particularly in projects related to bioscience, nanotechnology and neuroscience.
"UQ Research Week has highlighted a selection of important projects and the UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards have introduced the work of some of our brightest young researchers," Professor Siddle said.
Funding for the winning researchers was provided by the UQ Foundation, UQ’s research-only budget and the Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Initiatives Fund.
The 2004 winners are:
Dr Virginia Slaughter, a senior lecturer with the School of Psychology, received $45,000 to look at how and when babies and young children understand what it means to be human. A central element of the human experience is thinking about ourselves and the people around us, so if we can understand this aspect of normal development, we may gain new insights into some forms of developmental disorder where understanding self and others is atypical or incomplete, such as in autism and schizophrenia.
Dr Julie Jonsson, a member of the Liver Research Group based at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, received $75,000 to look at ways to halt the progress of chronic liver disease, which affects a quarter of million Australians. It is estimated by the year 2020 more than 2000 Queenslanders will require a liver transplant. However, only about 50 donor organs are available each year so there is a desperate need for therapeutic treatments that will delay or reverse the progression of the disease. Dr Jonsson has found a protein molecule known as angiotensin, which may be a key to stopping the progression of the disease.
Dr Gerard Goggin, an Australian Research Fellow with UQ`s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, received $60,000 to study how mobile phones and the internet have become much more than new communication tools for young people today. Young people are extraordinary users of these technologies but very little research has been done into why. The research will also look at the cultural impact mobile phones and the internet have for people in both regional and metropolitan areas.
Dr Norelle Daly, a researcher with UQ`s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), received $50,000 to determine the molecular structure of retrocyclin, a molecule with the ability to protect human cells from HIV infection. Additionally, retrocyclin also appears to protect cells from HSV infection, which is predicted to cost countries world-wide upwards of US$61 billion over the next 25 years in treating.
Dr Michael Monteiro, a polymer chemist with UQ`s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), received $75,000 to develop a more effective, economical and environmentally friendly way to make complex polymer architectures that will have greater functionality and structural design than any other structure previously made. The aim of his work is to prepare these architectures on the nanoscale with the same precision, complexity and variety as that of small molecules. While commercial applications of this type of work were slowly being implemented in bulk commodities like paints and scratch resistant coatings for cars, the greatest impact would be in the biotechnology fields such as vaccine and drug design and delivery.
Dr Philip Poronnik, a senior lecturer in the School of Biomedical Sciences, received $70,000 to help unravel the molecular processes in the kidney which retrieves proteins. Understanding how our kidneys absorb protein from urine should give medical researchers more ammunition to fight skyrocketing kidney disease in diabetics. Once the molecular mechanisms were understood, researchers could work out what goes wrong in diabetes and find ways to reduce the damage caused by excess protein. Diabetes is one of the most common causes of kidney disease affecting Australians and the diabetic kidney disease is set to increase dramatically in the next two decades.
Dr Lexa Grutter, from the School of Life Sciences, received $70,000 to examine how coral reef fish obtain their own sunscreens. Fish in the shallow waters of the Great Barrier Reef are exposed to more than thirty times the ultra-violet radiation levels needed to cause human sunburn. Studying cleaner-fish, she has found they have a “super” sunscreen that she suspects they get from eating the mucus from other fish.
Dr Maosen Zhong, a senior lecturer from UQ’s Business School, received $75,000 to come up with a better method of evaluating big investment projects and meeting required returns. He hopes to develop a step-by-step formula to predict equity capital – the amount a company’s shareholders invest in their company. The results would help financial managers and treasury staff evaluate investments such as new offices or factories and would help corporate and government investors meet required returns on their investments.
Dr Ling Li, a senior lecturer in environmental modelling with the School of Engineering, received $60,000 for a project examining the groundwater pathways of land-derived chemicals into coastal waters. Unlike most other studies into the leaching of agricultural-based chemicals into the sea, which focus on above-ground activities such as river flow and run-off, Dr Li’s work looks at what’s happening beneath the ground surface. He is attempting to understand and measure the carriage of nutrients through submarine groundwater discharge such as from the sugarcane-growing areas of north-east Queensland into the waters around the Great Barrier Reef. He said the data gathered from his project was urgently needed in order to properly assess the impact of agricultural chemicals on marine environments.
Dr Andrew White, a senior lecturer with the School of Physical Sciences, received $75,000 for a project that could lead to improved internal computer network security at banks and financial institutions. Quantum cryptography was of great interest to financial institutions because it could provide a commercial advantage. Science is currently in the middle of a revolution in thinking thanks to a field of study known as quantum information. In the everyday world, objects were either here or there or on or off – the way computers work. However, in quantum mechanics things were different as objects can be in two places or "states" at once.
Media: For further information on any of the winners or their projects, contact Andrew Dunne at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2802 or 0405 186 732). Videos and still photos are available at www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek
