2012 Victorian Award Winner

Dr Peter Enticott

Monash University Research Field: Neuroscience Autism spectrum disorder (ASD, including autism and Asperger’s disorder) are a group of life-long developmental disabilities that severely affect someone’s ability to interact and communicate with others. People with ASD also display significant problems with behaviour, communication, sensory function and motor control. The number of people diagnosed with ASD has increased dramatically over…

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Dr Seth Masters

The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Research Field: Inflammation/Medical Research Seth Masters’ research investigates how our body works out what a bad infection is, as opposed to the normal healthy species that live in our gut and the harmless microbes we encounter in the world each day. They then try and work out the different signaling pathways…

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Dr Tu’uhevaha Kaitu’u-Lino

The University of Melbourne, Mercy Hospital for Women Research Field: Medical Research–Women’s Health Preeclampsia is a dreaded complication of pregnancy that kills 60,000 women globally each year and countless more babies. In preeclampsia, toxins escape from the placenta, spread throughout the mother, attacking her organs and causing her to become very sick. The only cure is to…

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Dr Aaron Thornton

CSIRO Research Field: Applied Mathematics Imagine a room filled with bouncy balls that never stop bouncing. That’s how gas molecules behave, but they are a million times smaller and travel a million times faster. To blow your mind further, about one million trillion gas molecules hit your face per second. Can you feel them? These small molecules…

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Dr Alex Fornito

The University of Melbourne Research Field: Psychiatry and Neuroscience Dr. Fornito’s research is focused on brains; how they work, how they are affected by mental illness and how they are influenced by our genetic make-up. Our brains are extraordinarily complex networks, made up of billions of nerve cells interconnected by trillions of fibers. Disturbances in the way…

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Dr Ben Emery

The University of Melbourne and Florey Neuroscience Institutes Research Field: Neuroscience Within the brain, nerve cells must send signals (nerve impulses) along nerve fibers to other parts of the brain and to our muscles. The proper conduction of these nerve impulses is dependent on myelin, an insulating substance that surrounds the nerve fibers in a similar manner…

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Dr Colin Scholes

The University of Melbourne, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Research Field: Climate change mitigation The solution to climate change is about reducing carbon emissions to the environment as cheaply as possible, so that you and your family and friends do not pay a costly burden for Australia to meet emission reduction targets. To do this Australian…

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Dr Elena Tucker

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Research Field: Medical Genetics/Mitochondrial Disease Just like a car needs fuel to run, so too does the human body. This fuel (or energy) is generated from the food we eat by mitochondria, a tiny part of every cell in our body. Mitochondrial disease is a devastating disorder that occurs when mitochondria can’t make…

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Dr Georgina Such

The University of Melbourne Research Field: Polymer and Material Science Every year many people are diagnosed with various types of cancer and are forced to have painful treatments such as chemotherapy. The dreadful side-effects of this treatment, including loss of hair and debilitating sickness, are caused by the direct injection of a drug that kills the cancer…

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Dr James McCaw

The University of Melbourne Research Field: Infectious disease epidemiology Influenza spreads through the community every year, causing many of us to miss work or school, with significant health and economic costs. But the flu can also have far more devastating consequences. In 1918 it killed 40 million people in one year. While we were lucky in 2009…

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