Dr Shafagh Waters
Scientia Senior lecturer, UNSW What is the problem you are trying to address? Cystic Fibrosis (CF) remains an incurable life-limiting inherited condition. Despite development of therapeutics that directly repair the CFTR protein dysfunction, the clinical heterogeneity in therapeutic response in patients, has necessitated development of a clinical tool that predicts treatment response for individual patients….
Read More »Dr Thomas Tu
Group Leader, Viral Hepatitis pathogenesis lab, Storr Liver Centre, Westmead Institute for Medical Rsearch Senior Research fellow, University of Sydney What is the problem you are trying to address? Every minute, a person dies from chronic hepatitis B. This is a devastating condition that affects 300 million people around the world (including myself) and it…
Read More »Dr Vince Polito
Senior Research Fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. What is the problem you are trying to address? Nearly half of all Australians will experience mental illness at some point in their life. Although we have some excellent treatments, these do not work for all individuals and even when they do work,…
Read More »Dr Jiao Jiao Li
Lecturer, Group Leader, and NHMRC Early Career Fellow at UTS Musculoskeletal conditions, including osteoarthritis and bone fractures, are the leading cause of chronic disabilities in Australia and globally, incurring enormous healthcare costs. As a biomedical engineer, Jiao Jiao combines approaches from multiple fields to create regenerative solutions for bone and joint diseases. Her work contributed…
Read More »Dr Laura McKemmish
Senior Lecturer in the School of Chemistry at the University of New South Wales How did life emerge in space? Is there life on other planets? For the first time, a technique known as spectroscopy is giving us the technological capacity to answer these questions scientifically. Spectroscopy involves splitting light into its component wavelengths, much…
Read More »Dr Amandeep Kaur
Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University What is the problem you are trying to address? Super-resolution imaging is the exciting new technology that provides a molecular-level picture of cellular events, but the scope and application of this technology has been hampered by scarcity and poor quality of fluorescent tools…
Read More »Dr Peter Irga
What is the problem you are trying to address? There is a clear need for air cleaning technologies that are capable of effectively filtering a comprehensive range of pollutants in an energy efficient manner. It is widely recognized by all sectors of industry and government that innovative technological solutions will be required to achieve climate…
Read More »Dr Matthew Griffith
What is the problem you are trying to address? Communicating with the nervous system in our body using electronic devices is an exciting new method to treat diseases or create artificial sensory devices. However, hard and inflexible electronic materials like metals and silicon have poor biocompatibility, leading to problems communicating with the soft, flexible nerve…
Read More »Dr Caitlin Cowan
Bacteria and viruses get a lot of bad press, but not all microbes are harmful. In fact, we need some of them to keep us alive and healthy. As a psychologist, Dr Caitlin Cowan is interested in how these microbes (known as our “microbiome”) might also influence our mental health. She studies the microbiome of…
Read More »Dr Amy Cain
ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, in the School of Natural Sciences and in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology There are very few antibiotics available that can effectively kill modern-day germs that make us sick. Nasty bacteria have developed clever strategies to resist our miracle drugs and it’s been…
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