Dr Chloe Lucas, 2023 Tasmanian Young Tall Poppy of the Year, is a geographer whose research focuses on forms of communication that can bridge these divides and improve climate citizenship.
Chloe leads Curious Climate Schools – a project that asks students what they want to know about climate change, and matches them with experts to answer their questions. Over the last two years they’ve answered almost 500 questions from 50 classes around Tasmania.
Chloe’s research on bushfire communication has had a tangible impact on communities in Greater Hobart, leading to a partnership of four local governments to trial a new model of bushfire preparedness communication through the ‘Sparking Conversations, Igniting Action’ project.
Dr Jessica Kretzmann’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of new materials for both the delivery of gene therapies, and for the rapid detection and diagnosis of disease conditions. Gene therapies have the potential to revolutionise treatment of diseases such as cancer, avoiding traditional chemotherapy side-effects, but currently there are no safe and efficient methods to get these therapies inside the cancerous cells.
To address and solve this complex delivery problem, Dr Kretzmann works between multiple disciplines, including chemistry, nanotechnology, engineering, and biology. She developed a new material for gene delivery and demonstrated highly efficient delivery of genome editing tools in mouse models of breast cancer, resulting in tumour regression. Recently, Dr Kretzmann developed methods where gene therapeutics can be folded into defined nanoparticle shapes for specific cell targeting and gene expression, using a technique called ‘DNA origami’.
Andrew Woods is an Associate Professor at Curtin University where he manages the HIVE visualisation facility and is a Research Engineer at the Centre for Marine Science & Technology. He specialises in visualisation, stereoscopic 3D imaging, and 3D reconstruction with applications in many areas including maritime archaeology. He has BEng and MEng degrees in electronic engineering and his PhD was on the topic of crosstalk in stereoscopic displays.
The social media landscape is complex and dynamic. Billions of users produce large quantities of social media data every day.
Mingming’s research examines how we can leverage the power of social media to better address social issues, while also identifying and mitigating risks. Mingmins’ research uses advanced data science and visual analytics to better inform people’s decision making and behaviour in various contexts. His research also addresses topical social issues for which social media can provide otherwise non-existent data, or for which social media data sheds new light and provides different perspectives.
Mingming is deeply committed to communicating science and championing scientific literacy by regularly engaging with mainstream media and delivering social media analytics presentations/workshops to a range of stakeholders, including high school students and their parents, international business leaders and policy makers and the general public.
Mingming’s PhD was awarded in 2017 from the University of Technology Sydney. He is currently an Associate Professor in Digital Marketing, leading the Social Media Research Lab at Curtin University.
1 in 3 older Australians living in the community experience a fall each year, with resulting fractures often compromising independence. While no pharmaceutical interventions can preserve muscle function and thus prevent falls, emerging evidence indicate an important role for nutrition that requires urgent investigation.
Dr Marc Sim has demonstrated the importance of diet by identifying specific foods such as green leafy and cruciferous vegetables that enhance musculoskeletal health and lower falls risk. He is now exploring how nitrate and vitamin K1 from these vegetables optimise muscle function and bone structure, representing major risk factors for falls and fractures.
Blood cancers are collectively the third most common cancer in Australia and forecast to be the leader cause of cancer related death by 2030. Thousands of Western Australians are diagnosed with a blood cancer each year, and thousands more are living with the disease. While some patients are cured using chemotherapy, many are not. They need better treatments. Research – clinical trials – are the best way to deliver them.
Professor Chan Cheah is passionate about designing and conducting innovative clinical trials to offer patients with blood cancers (particularly lymphoma) access to potentially life-saving novel therapies, years before commercial availability. In 2018 he founded a charity – Blood Cancer Research WA –which supports a program to deliver trials giving access to new ways of treating blood cancer – cellular therapies, bispecific antibodies, small molecule inhibitors – at no cost to patients. During this time, Professor Cheah has developed several investigator-initiated trials in follicular lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma which are now open to enrolment, all with practice changing potential.
The Universe is vast and mystifying. There are so many questions we want answered and phenomena that we want to discover and/or further understand.
Dr Karen Lee-Waddell is the Director of the Australian SKA Regional Centre (AusSRC). The AusSRC is an equal partnership between CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency, Curtin University, the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, and the University of Western Australia.
Dr Lee-Waddell is currently leading the Australian effort to build computing and data intensive research capabilities to support astronomers using current and next generation radio telescopes, with the overall aim of using the best technology to solve some of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.
Cancer therapies, like chemotherapy, can cause devastating side-effects for young female survivors, such as infertility and early menopause. Now, immunotherapies are revolutionising cancer therapy. They activate the patient’s immune system to target and kill tumour cells. Because they are so effective, patients are receiving these drugs before the full spectrum of side-effects have been tested.
Women are often excluded from clinical trials of new cancer therapies. Therefore, the impacts of immunotherapies on the female reproductive system were unknow. Dr Amy Winship’s research addressed this crucial knowledge gap.
Dr Winship’s recent data showed for the first time that immunotherapies cause an inflammatory response in the ovaries. This inflammation is damaging enough to kill the eggs stored within, which may have permanent impacts to fertility and hormone production that is necessary to support overall health in girls and women.
This finding has been ground-breaking in her field because it has uncovered entirely new interactions between the immune system and the ovary, which were previously unknown.
Dr Winship’s current studies are testing the long-term impacts of immunotherapies on hormone levels and pregnancy. At the same time, her team are testing multiple different protection strategies, including tests of an existing drug that is already approved to treat inflammation.
Viruses, like influenza and SARS-CoV-2, can make you sick. Children are great at controlling viral infections resulting in mild symptoms, like a running nose, cough and fever, which resolve within a few days. Elderly people have a reduced ability to control infections, resulting severe disease, hospitalization and even death.
Dr Carolien van de Sandt’s research aims to understand why our immune system loses its ability to respond to viruses as we get older. She compares killer-T-cells of children and elderly people to understand why they respond differently and use this knowledge to improve vaccines and treatment strategies.
Immunotherapy is a treatment type that guides our body’s immune system to target and eliminate cancer cells with precision. However, it only works in 80-90% of patients, prompting the need for new immunotherapies.
Together with a cross-disciplinary team, Dr Teh has discovered a new way to boost cancer immunotherapy by targeting Treg cells. Treg cells impede the immune system’s cancer-fighting capabilities. The team found a ‘kill switch’ to trigger Treg cell suicide and are currently testing its potential to enhance cancer immunotherapy.
