Dr Adrienne Young
Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Services Research

I worked as a hospital dietitian for several years and could see that the way nutrition care was being provided did not support better health.

In my research, I’m finding ways to improve care outcomes for older people through food and nutrition. My team was awarded a Medical Research Future Fund grant to establish the Australian Frailty Network, aiming to provide a national response to frailty. Through this project I was able to travel to Canada, to meet with international frailty experts and observe their work.

I am also leading a national study to develop quality indicators for hospitals to measure and benchmark the quality of their nutrition care. The goal is to share and improve best practice. I hope my research will enhance the quality of hospital nutrition and food services, so that patients have the best possible outcomes

Dr Jaimon Kelly
Research Fellow at the Centre for Online Health

I always wanted to pursue a clinical profession and never considered myself a researcher. But, while studying dietetics, I realised my patients’ questions were often due to gaps in existing research. I realised I could become the source of knowledge and help answer these pressing questions.

Now I specialise in digital nutrition, telehealth and chronic disease management. I led Dietitians Australia’s telehealth-delivered nutrition care position statement, and my work informed national telehealth guidelines for allied health clinical services in Victoria.

My research has also been recognised internationally and was used as the evidence base for telehealth guidelines on nutrition management and chronic disease by the Centre for Disease Control.

I hope my research leaves a legacy on my profession and enables a digital health care system that is truly equitable, accessible and easy to navigate.

Dr Enda Byrne
Senior Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre

My area of research is known as genetic epidemiology. It seeks to understand how genetic factors contribute to health and disease, and interplay with environmental factors. My research allows me to combine my interests in genetics and psychology to investigate the role of genetic risk factors in common mental health problems.

My group uses data from longitudinal studies to investigate how genetics and environment influence mental health throughout development. Many mental health disorders begin in childhood and adolescence and so we want to research mental health in young people when some of these problems may be preventable.

Recently our work has shown that adolescents who report symptoms of depression or anxiety, and who are at high genetic risk for depression, are 7 times more likely to suffer from depression in adulthood than those at low genetic risk.

I hope that a better understanding of the nature of mental health problems can lead to the development of new therapies and for better targeting of existing therapies. Then people will get relief from their symptoms more quickly.

Dr Emma Sweeney
Postdoctoral Researcher at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research

I initially planned to study forensic sciences at university but took a foundational course in microbiology and fell in love. I was fascinated by the idea that there is a whole ‘invisible’ world of microbes that can be both good and bad.

My research focuses on developing tools to detect and characterise microorganisms, from sexually transmitted bacteria to viral infections in immunosuppressed children. An area of particular interest for me is antimicrobial resistance, where I’ve worked on enhancing treatments and developing better diagnostics. I completed a prestigious Researcher Exchange and Development within Industry (REDI) fellowship with industry partner SpeeDx, and was recently successful in securing a UQ Research Partnerships and Translation Excellence Award.

I’d like to develop rapid diagnostics to diagnose infections at the bedside instead of the lab, and tools to detect active infections. Many current diagnostics detect a specific microbe, but not whether the organism has already been killed by medication or the immune system. Tailored diagnostics to detect active infections can provide information on whether an infection has been resolved, or when patients require additional treatments.

These types of tools could help tackle a range of other diseases such as tuberculosis, sepsis, sexually-transmitted infections and even COVID-19.

Dr Arutha Kulasinghe
Senior Research Fellow at the Frazer Institute

During my grandfather’s surgery for colorectal cancer, the surgeon came out with a silver bowl to show us the size of his tumour. It was the size of a football. From that pivotal moment onwards, the seed was planted in my mind that I wanted to understand how tumours grew and find new ways to treat them.

My research area uses digital spatial profiling, or a ‘Google Maps’ approach, to measure hundreds of biomarkers on a tumour simultaneously. We’re able to walk across a tumour, cell by cell, to understand how these cells communicate. This gives us deep insight into whether therapies will be able to recognise and kill the tumour.

Our work has led to a new understanding of potential ways in which to identify patients likely to benefit from current generations of immunotherapy in lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and skin cancer.

We hope to build intricate cell atlases of patients’ tumours that are responsive and resistant to current immunotherapies, so that we can map the biology that dictates therapy responses. This work should lead to the personalisation of medicine, meaning we are able to identify which therapy is most likely to benefit an individual.