Nikola is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI) in Newcastle, NSW. After being awarded a PhD in schizophrenia genomics in 2006 she received an NHMRC training (postdoctoral) Fellowship in 2009 and changed her research focus to DNA repair and cancer. In 2010, she was an invited Visiting Fellow at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, in the US. She was awarded the University of Newcastle Young Alumni of the Year in 2011 for excellence in leadership and innovation.
Nikola leads a team of researchers investigating DNA repair triggered by sunlight and chemotherapy in melanoma. She is also investigating the same process in ovarian cancers that are resistant to chemotherapy. Her overall goal is to rapidly develop new combination therapies and diagnostic tests for both melanoma and ovarian cancer.
Nikola is a proud Mum of three and an advocate for women in science and scientific communication. She regularly speaks at major community events and with cancer patient support/advocacy groups.
Adrian is a Senior Research Fellow at the Monash Clinical and Imaging Neuroscience, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University. His research examines the impact that neuroscience has on understanding and treatment of addiction and other compulsive behaviours. This includes the impact of neuroscience on: our notions of agency, identity and moral responsibility; the use of coercion and the capacity for voluntary control of addictive or compulsive behaviours; and the use of emerging technologies, such as deep brain stimulation and brain imaging, to treat addiction.
After completing his PhD at the Queensland Brain Institute (2009), Adrian was awarded an NHMRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2014). He is currently funded by an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (2014-2017). He received the Australasian Professional Society of Alcohol and Other Drugs “Early Career Award for Excellence in Research and Science” (2012), the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Award for Excellence in Research (2010) and The University of Queensland Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research Higher Degree Theses (2010). Adrian has published two books, including ‘Addiction Neuroethics: The Promises and Perils of Addiction Neuroscience’ (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has over 80 publications, including reports for the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, and the Australian Ministerial Council on Drugs Strategy. He has been an advisor to the WHO and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the use of coercion in drug treatment and the ethical treatment of opioid dependence.
From Edinburgh, Scotland, Michael is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland. His research is focussed on understanding biomaterial tissue mechanics for application to novel micro-devices for drug and vaccine delivery. Specifically, he employs mechanical engineering testing techniques to understand how to better design devices for functional interaction with epithelial tissue. He earned his MEng (Hons) in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Glasgow in 2007, followed by a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Queensland’s AIBN in 2012. He then joined a start-up company working to translate a medical device from laboratory testing to human clinical trials, which was built upon the devices that he was working on during his PhD. His focus within the company was on engineering a device for scale up to human, performing a range of pre-clinical trials. At the beginning of 2014 Michael returned to an academic research role at the University of Queensland where he continues to work on novel biomedical device research, with a keen focus on translatable technologies. His goal is to be able to expand understanding of biological interactions for microdevices and subsequently apply these with advanced manufacturing techniques for rapid translation of low cost healthcare.
Hamish is currently Climate Science Coordinator in the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, where he coordinates research, data management and delivery for a range of climate change impacts. He also recently completed a PhD at UNSW looking at the impacts of climate change on bushfire risk. Hamish is interested in the link between science, policy and outcomes. He is committed to public interest science and collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches that engage end users from project conception to completion and beyond. Hamish also runs Science at the Local, bringing together scientists and community members in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
Drew is an Associate Professor and research leader of Energy & Advanced Manufacturing in the Future Industries Institute, University of South Australia. After completing his PhD from the Australian National University in 2006, he worked in private industry in Adelaide until late 2010, before joining the University of South Australia. To date Drew has published over 40 articles in journals such as Nature Materials and Advanced Materials, and secured $8.2M in research funding for projects in partnership with industry. As a result of this he is co-inventor on numerous patents, which have led to several commercial products in the market place, including the world’s first plastic automotive mirror (>1.5 million on new vehicles in the USA). Drew was awarded the 2013 SA Young Tall Poppy of the Year award, and is a member of the South Australian Science Council.
Roslyn is a Research Scientist with IBM Research - Australia. As an applied mathematician, Roslyn works with inter-disciplinary teams across problems in the natural resources and healthcare areas. In 2014 Roslyn was awarded the IBM Client Value Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. Roslyn completed her PhD studies through UNSW Canberra in 2010, where her research into the critical times of heat and mass transfer through multiple layers was jointly awarded the Ria de Groot prize for the best female postgraduate student. Roslyn then took up a position as a Research Fellow with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. At NCEPH, Roslyn’s work focussed on informing policy and practice through the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. In December 2011 Roslyn was awarded a four year University of Newcastle Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to continue her work in infectious disease modelling, before joining IBM Research - Australia in May 2014. Roslyn’s infectious disease modelling work has ranged from methodological contributions to working on multidisciplinary teams for specific diseases, including tuberculosis, dengue fever, influenza and Ebola.
Roslyn has been heavily involved in the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics professional body, having served on the national executive since 2010, and as the Early Career Representative since 2013. Roslyn has made significant contributions to the organisation of six conferences, including chairing an international workshop on infectious disease modelling in Newcastle. Roslyn has been instrumental in creating opportunities for early career mathematicians, having successfully advocated for the inclusion of a research student representative on the national executive of ANZIAM, and the co-location of the AMSI Early Career Research Workshops with the ANZIAM conference. Roslyn is also involved in mathematics outreach activities, including contributing to the design of a maths based problem for the Science and Engineering Challenge, and having spoken on 2NURFM on several occasions about interesting maths problems.
Liz undertook her undergraduate and Masters studies at the University of Sydney, and completed her PhD in 2009 at Durham University, UK. From 2010-2011 she was a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California (Berkeley). In 2012, Liz returned to the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry, holding a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council (2012-2014). Her research is focussed on the development of small molecule fluorescent and magnetic resonance probes for the study of biological systems. Liz received the Royal Society of Chemistry Dalton Young Researchers Award (2011), the Asian Biological Inorganic Chemistry Early Career Researcher Award (2014), The Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2015) and a NSW Young Tall Poppy Award (2015). She was the Royal Australian Chemical Institute NSW Nyholm Youth Lecturer in 2014-2015, giving outreach talks in high schools throughout the state.
Carly is a Research Scientist at CSIRO Food and Nutrition in Adelaide. She is a geneticist who uses molecular biology and bioinformatics to “study the unseen majority” commonly known as microbes. Her current research is focused on characterising the role of microbes in promoting human gut health. Another area of interest is the study of methane-producing microbes, which allowed her to spend time in the United States as a Fulbright Professional Scholar in Climate Change and Clean Energy in 2015. Carly is a passionate advocate for gender diversity in science and is seeking to encourage more female EMCRs to acts as mentors, with the aim of enabling younger women coming through the system to reach their full potential.
Sharath is the joint leader of the Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, from where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 2009. He is also the Deputy Director of the University’s Micro Nano Research Facility, a 1,200 sq.m. state-of-the-art micro/nanofabrication capability. Sharath’s expertise includes the synthesis of functional thin films (at thickness scales 1/1000th to 1/100th of a human hair) and micro/nanostructures and devices. He has published 100 peer-reviewed publications. He is the recipient of the 2010 Gold Medal for Excellence in Research from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering, a 2011-2014 Australian Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, the 2012 NMI Prize for Measurement Excellence from the National Measurement Institute, Australia, a 2012 Victoria Fellowship, and the 2014 RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Early Career Researcher Award.
Irene is a Senior Research Fellow at the Physics Department in Curtin University. Originally from Spain, Irene completed her PhD from University of Sussex (UK) in 2007. After a post-doc at the Institute of Materials of Nantes (France), she moved to Curtin University for her second post-doc in 2009. The year after, she obtained an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2014). Her first daughter and her current ARC Future Fellowship award arrived almost at the same time in 2014. Her research career has been mainly dedicated to the atomistic modelling of carbon materials. In collaboration with experimental chemists, physicists and engineers, she has investigated graphite, diamond, amorphous carbons and a range of carbon nanomaterials. She has won multiple prizes for her scientific outreach projects and particularly enjoys creating scientific artistic images.
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