Tag Archives: L’Oreal For Women in Science

White cell assassins prove kiss of death for cancer

White blood cells have proven to be the serial assassins of the immune system, moving quickly on to their next target once they’re released from a dying cancer cell’s grip.

Misty Jenkins. Credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au

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Typhoid tips off new epidemic approach

A typhoid outbreak in Kathmandu has provided new insights into bacterial epidemics and antibiotic resistance, thanks to a Melbourne scientist’s genomic research.

Kathryn Holt. Credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au

Kathryn Holt, of the University of Melbourne’s Bio21 Institute, used genome sequencing to discover that an epidemic of deadly typhoid bacteria in Nepal’s capital city was driven by climate, and not by the outbreak of novel genetic strains.

Her research, published in the Royal Society journal Open Biology, changes our understanding of how typhoid spreads and how we can better respond to other bacterial epidemics.

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Infrared gets under dragon skin

Bearded dragons are revealing some of the secrets behind their colour-changing ways, thanks to the work of a Melbourne evolutionary scientist.

Devi Stuart-Fox with a bearded dragon. Credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au

Devi Stuart-Fox has discovered that bearded dragons change colour in response to heat, allowing them to regulate their body temperature.

Her research opens the way for scientists to imitate lizards and develop materials that respond to light and temperature for solar energy, sensor and biomedical applications.

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How Australia and India broke up—100 million years ago

Dr Joanne (Jo) Whittaker, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart

Dr Joanne (Jo) Whittaker likes to solve jigsaw puzzles. Now this marine geoscientist is tackling the biggest puzzle on the planet—the formation of continents.
WithSDP_0059 the help of Australia’s national marine research vessels, and now her L’Oréal Fellowship, Jo is reconstructing how the Indian, Australian and Antarctic tectonic plates separated over the past 200 million years, forming the Indian Ocean and the continents as we see them today. This information will help us model climate change better, find new gas resources, and understand the dynamics of the land in which we live.

The piece of this jigsaw she is now working on centres on two underwater plateaux, the Batavia and Gulden Draak Knolls, towering about 3000 metres above the Perth Abyssal Plain (PAP), which is around 1600 kilometres off the coast of Geraldton in Western Australia. In November 2011, Jo’s team mapped and sampled rocks from both knolls. Based on the evidence so far, Jo says, it looks like they split from the margins of the moving Indian Plate about 100 million years ago.
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When killing saves lives: our immune system at work

Dr Misty Jenkins, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne

Misty-Jenkins-700x500Dr Misty Jenkins spends a lot of her time watching killers at work: the white blood cells of the body that eliminate infected and cancerous cells. She can already tell you a great deal about how they develop into assassins and arm themselves. Now with the support of her L’Oréal For Women in Science Fellowship Misty is exploring how they become efficient serial killers—killing one cancer cell in minutes and moving on to hunt down others. Her work will give us a greater understanding of our immune system and open the way to better manage T cells to defeat disease.

Misty’s career so far has been quite a journey for a girl from Ballarat. Along the way she been mentored by Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Prof Peter Doherty and become the first Indigenous Australian to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. Now working with Prof Joe Trapani as a National Health and Medical Research Council  (NHMRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Cancer Cell Death laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Misty has been awarded a $25,000 L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand For Women in Science Fellowship. She will use the money to further her study of what triggers T cells to detach themselves from their targets and seek additional prey.
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Giving patients more control of their lives

Dr Suetonia Palmer

University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand

Dr Suetonia Palmer is challenging the status quo for kidney disease treatment and helping millions of people with chronic kidney disease take back control of their lives.

Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Suetonia Palmer, University of Otago (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Suetonia Palmer, University of Otago (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

Working from temporary facilities as Christchurch rebuilds, she is guiding doctors and policy makers across the world as they attempt to make the best decisions for their patients.

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More efficient solar cells with quantum dots

Dr Baohua Jia

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

The global race to develop high efficiency, low cost solar energy is fierce. And Baohua Jia and her colleagues are front runners.

Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Baohua Jia, Swinburne University of Technology (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Baohua Jia, Swinburne University of Technology (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

Conventional solar cells are efficient, but thick and expensive. Baohua and her colleagues imagine a future when solar cells are so thin and cheap that city skyscrapers will be powered by a coating on their glass. But at present such thin-film solar cells are not efficient enough for general use.

Using her knowledge of nanotechnology and optics, Baohua and her colleagues have already created thin-film solar cells that are more than 20 per cent more efficient than those of her competitors. They have already lodged two patents.

But Baohua thinks she can do better. And that will be the focus of the work assisted by her $25,000 L’Oréal Australia & New Zealand For Women in Science Fellowship.

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New treatments for blood cancers

Dr Kylie Mason

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Kylie Mason, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Kylie Mason, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

Dr Kylie Mason has set herself the goal of developing new ways of treating diseases that are considered incurable.

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A smarter way to deliver drugs

Georgina Such

Georgina Such, The University of Melbourne (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Georgina Such, The University of Melbourne (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

The University of Melbourne

Smart capsules could change the way we deliver drugs.

Today, when we’re treated for cancer, the drug spreads throughout the body indiscriminately. Along the way it causes side-effects such as nausea and hair loss. Continue reading A smarter way to deliver drugs

Can we save the tiger with mathematics?

Eve McDonald-Madden

Eve McDonald Madden, The University of Queensland (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Eve McDonald Madden, The University of Queensland (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

The University of Queensland

Turning to mathematics to allow us to make smarter conservation decisions.

The diversity of life on Earth underpins the global economy. But we’re losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate and human-induced climate change will threaten more species—up to 37 per cent of the plants and animals with which we share the world. Continue reading Can we save the tiger with mathematics?