Research Australia welcomed the Newcastle Herald article featuring Professor Brett Mitchell’s UTI research which will reduce patient infection risk in Australian hospitals and save health services money.
Professor Brett Mitchell, an infection control expert, has found that using antiseptic before inserting a catheter reduces the risk of urinary tract infection in hospitals.
Click here to read the full article on the Newcastle Herald’s website.
Dr Avnika Ruparelia is an early career researcher in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, who has made outstanding contributions to the muscle disease field.
Continue reading “2017 Griffith University Discovery Award Winner: Dr Avnika Ruparelia”
Dr Rebecca Coll is an Early Career Researcher at The University of Queensland (UQ) Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), studying innate immunity and novel anti-inflammatory drugs.
Continue reading “2016 Discovery Award Winner: Dr Rebecca Coll”
Thank you to all those that nominated their heroes for the 2016 Research Australia Health & Medical Research Awards. 2016 has seen the highest number of nominations and the stories are amazing. We are enjoying sharing some of them with you.
Leadership in Corporate Giving Award recognises outstanding leadership by a corporation or business in giving to and supporting health and medical research. This is not necessarily about the actual amounts donated, rather it’s the relationship or partnership and commitment over time that is an important dimension of effective corporate giving. Which of these amazing people below will join the ranks of the prestigious Leadership in Corporate Giving Award alumni including: Channel Seven Perth, Coco’s Fresh Food Market Queensland, Estee Lauder, L.J. Hooker, Wesfarmers Ltd, Pfizer Australia, Macquarie Group Foundation, David Jones, Xstrata Coal, Rio Tinto, Bupa
Continue reading “Corporates with big hearts donate to support health and medical research”
Sharon Lewin is the inaugural director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital; Professor of Medicine, The University of Melbourne; consultant infectious diseases physician, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia; and an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Practitioner Fellow. She is an infectious diseases physician and basic scientist.
Sharon completed her medical training (MB., BS (Hons) 1986) and her PhD (1996) in Microbiology at Monash University, Melbourne Australia. She was trained in clinical infectious diseases in Melbourne (FRACP 1996) and did her post-doctoral fellowship with Professor David Ho at the Aaron Diamond Research Centre at the Rockefeller University, New York (1997-1999). David Ho was named Time Man of the Year in 1996 for his major contribution to discovering successful antiviral therapy for HIV. She was Director, Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University (2003-2014) and co-head of the Centre for Biomedical Research at the Burnet Institute (2011-2014), Melbourne, Australia.
She leads a large multi-disciplinary research team that focuses on understanding why HIV persists on treatment and developing clinical trials aimed at ultimately finding a cure for HIV infection. Her other research and clinical interests include understanding how the immune system recovers following treatment of HIV and the interaction between HIV and other important co-infections including hepatitis B virus. She is widely recognized for her innovative work in understanding how HIV hides on treatment using novel laboratory models and leading several early phase clinical trials of cancer drugs that alter HIV genes. Her clinical trial program is part of a close collaboration with the Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University.
She has published over 200 publications and her laboratory receives funding from the NHMRC, the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. She has extensive collaborations in Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, China and India as well as collaborations with investigators throughout the US and Europe. She is a co-principal investigator for the Delaney AIDS Research Enterprise to find a Cure – a $25million NIH funded program grant of over 30 investigators working on immunological interventions to develop a cure for HIV.
She was the local co-chair of the XXth International AIDS Conference (AIDS2014) which was held in Melbourne July 2015, which attracted over 14,000 participants and was the largest health conference ever held in Australia. In 2015, she became a member of the council of the NHMRC and chairs the newly established NHMRC Health Translation Advisory Committee.
In 2014 she was named Melburnian of the Year. This is an award made each year by the City of Melbourne to an inspirational role model who has made an outstanding contribution to the city in their chosen field. This was the first time the award was made to a physician or scientist.
Sharon is married to Bob Milstein, a health lawyer. They have two adult sons, Alex and Max who are mad Essendon supporters. She is a passionate Melburnian!
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, BA, MIR (Hons), MBA, DipLR, PhD, FAIM, FCHSM, FFPH RCP (UK) is Foundation Director, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Director, Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science, and Professor of Health Systems Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia. His research examines the changing nature of health systems, particularly patient safety, standards and accreditation, leadership and management, the structure and culture of organisations and their network characteristics, attracting funding of more than AUD$59 million.
Professor Braithwaite has published extensively (over 600 total publications) and he has presented at international and national conferences on more than 780 occasions, including over 75 keynote addresses. His research appears in journals such as British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Social Science & Medicine, BMJ Quality and Safety, International Journal of Quality in Health Care, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and many other prestigious journals. Professor Braithwaite has received numerous national and international awards for his teaching and research. Further details are available at his Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Braithwaite.
He has conducted large-scale research over two decades on clinical and organizational performance, health systems improvement and patient safety. Professor Braithwaite was author of a major study into health care inquiries, Patient safety: a comparative analysis of eight inquiries in six countries, UNSW, 2006 and another on the appropriateness of care in Australia (BMJ Open, 2012 and Medical Journal of Australia, 2012).
Professor Braithwaite recently co-edited a book with Professors Erik Hollnagel in Denmark and Bob Wears in the United States (Resilient Health Care, Ashgate, 2013), which proposes new models for tackling patient safety in acute settings and a second book in the series, The Resilience of Everyday Clinical Work, was published in 2015. His book on health reform in 30 countries with Professors Julie Johnson in Australia, Yukihiro Matsuyama in Japan and Russell Mannion in the UK was also published in 2015. A new book discussing sociological perspectives on patient safety with Professors Davina Allen at Cardiff University, Jane Sandall at King’s College, London and Justin Waring at Nottingham University.
Noteworthy projects in recent times include the CareTrack study, which found that 57% of care delivered to Australians is in line with level 1 evidence or consensus based guidelines. This was described by the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia when it was published in 2012 as the most important publication in that journal for the last 10 years. This study has been very influential amongst policy makers, managers, clinicians and patient groups in Australia and internationally. Another key project is the work he did with 30 countries, culminating in a book published in 2015. He included low, middle income and rich countries, looking at their reform activities and their quality and safety
initiatives. This work shows that reform is not an episodic activity. Every health system is continuously reforming and attempting to improve the care that is delivered. This work suggests that insufficient resources are allocated to evaluating reform measures and improvement activities.
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Professor Perry Bartlett is the founding director of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland and is an internationally-renowned neuroscientist doing ground-breaking research into the fundamental mechanisms that underpin brain function.
During his 30-year career, his research and discoveries have overturned existing dogma and led to new understanding, particularly in the areas of neuronal precursor regulation and neuron survival in the developing and adult nervous system. Most prominent among these has been his pioneering role in the discovery and characterisation of neuron-producing stem cells in the adult brain, which has resulted in an entirely new view of the adult brain’s restorative capacity and, more importantly, to the realisation that cognitive functions such as learning and memory appear to be regulated, at least in part, by the production of new neurons. This is leading to the development of new therapeutic strategies to stimulate functional recovery following stroke, ageing dementia and depression. This is of vital importance as the Australian community confronts the growing social and economic cost of neurological and mental health conditions, which account for almost 50 per cent of this nation’s burden of disease.
Professor Bartlett has published more than 240 papers, many of which have appeared in the world’s most influential journals and have attracted more than 13,000 citations and an h-index of 60. One of the most remarkable aspects of Professor Bartlett’s career has been his ability to correctly identify new mechanisms and concepts even though they appear to contradict the prevailing view. This speaks to an intellectual prescience and experimental ingenuity possessed by only a few scientists.
One of the cornerstones of Professor Bartlett’s career is the building of QBI in 2003. Since then he has grown the Institute from a fledgling operation with several of the world’s best neuroscientists to an international research hub with 500 staff dedicated to to finding out more about debilitating diseases of the brain. Beyond that, his achievements in neuroscience research and neuroscience leadership have been recognised with several prestigious awards.
This year he received the CSL Florey Medal and Prize, for significant achievements in biomedical science and the advancement of human health, which has been awarded just seven times since its inception in 1988. Previous winners include Professor Barry Marshall, Professor Jacques Miller and Professor Ian Frazer. He was also recently awarded the Australian Neuroscience Society’s Distinguished Achievement Award for an outstanding contribution to neuroscience in Australian and New Zealand, which has just six prior recipients since its inception in 1993.
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Dr Gardner has conducted research in the field of sports concussion for the past eight years. He received first class honours in Psychology (University of New England) and subsequently completed a Doctor of Psychology (Clinical Neuropsychology) degree at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he conducted research in to the acute and cumulative neuropsychological consequences of sport-related concussion. His thesis received the prestigious award for the Most Outstanding Dissertation for 2011 from the National Academy of Neuropsychology (USA). During his post-graduate studies he also pioneered and managed the Macquarie University Sports Concussion Clinic.
Following this Dr Gardner completed his PhD at Newcastle University, studying the potential long-term consequences of participation in collision sports. He has published 16 peer review articles, two book chapters, presented at numerous national and international conferences, and has contributed to the policy papers of Brain Injury Australia and Alzheimer’s Australia (NSW). In 2013 he was invited as a leading early career researcher to contribute to the Australian Academy of Science Theo Murphy High Flyer’s Think Tank on ‘inspiring smarter brain research in Australia’. He was also awarded an Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship to visit Harvard Medical School for four months in 2014. He is the Co-Director of the Hunter New England Sports Concussion Clinic.
Dr Gardner is now focusing on the potential long-term consequences of participation in collision sports. He is attempting to delineate the effect of head trauma as a risk factor for later life neurodegenerative disease by undertaking neuropsychological testing and neuroimaging investigation in active and retired athletes. His current research includes working on assessing retired rugby league players to determine their cognitive, neurological, psychiatric and psychological profiles. He is also currently also working on the video analysis of concussion in the National Rugby League, the first time this has ever been conducted. Dr Gardner created a tool, the Observational Research Analysis of Concussion in League Evaluation (ORACLE), that he is validating to assist club medical staff with recognising/detecting players who may have sustained a concussion (and should be removed from play for further assessment).
The results of the video analysis and the use of the ORACLE will hopefully help prevent concussions by identifying at-risk behaviour, in addition to detecting concussion, which will significantly improve player welfare. He is currently involved with a consortium of researchers from Cardiff University Brain Imaging Research Centre (CUBRIC) in research discussion with the Welsh Government and Welsh Rugby Union to monitor and examine concussed active and retired players.
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The 14th annual Research Australia Health and Medical Research Awards honoured some of the country’s top minds and big hearts for their incredible contribution to health and medical research in Australia.
Research Australia is proud to have had such an extraordinary night with incredible researchers who have distinguished themselves in their careers, be it early stage, mid career or through a lifelong commitment to HMR.
It is with great pleasure that we present the 2016 winners of the Research Australia Awards :
Recognises an Australian who has made an outstanding contribution to building Australia’s international reputation in the area of health and medical research, and fostering collaboration for better health.
Recognises an Australian from the media, a celebrity or member of the community who has raised community awareness about the benefits of health and medical research.
Recognises an early researcher (no more than five years post PhD) whose paper/patent/discovery has already demonstrated its importance or impact.
To recognise and encourage personal philanthropic donations over a period of time by an individual or family to health and medical research.
For the development of the most innovative method of gathering, making available, processing or interpreting data in a way that advances the sector.
Highly Commended: The National Breast Cancer Foundation and DreamLab (Vodafone and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research)
Recognises outstanding leadership by a corporation or business giving to and supporting health and medical research through relationships or partnership and commitment over time.
ARCH AWARDCreated in 2014 to recognise the importance of the emerging field of health service research.
With its accompanying grant of $80,000, has played a part in assisting some of Australia’s most important leaders and innovators in the medical research sphere. Its focus is on helping support career development with an emphasis on human health and Australian research.
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