Congratulations to our NHMRC Ideas grant awardees

L-R top: Prof Harshal Nandurkar, Dr Zhong-Lin Chai, Dr Sih Min Tan;
L-R bottom: Prof Patrick Kwan, Dr Mastura Monif, A/Prof Sandy Shultz

Congratulations to Central Clinical School'sNational Health and Medical Research Council (NHMCR) winners in this very difficult round, being the six of our school's 87 applications which were funded. See detail below.

Professor Mark Cooper, Head of Diabetes, said, "For those who missed out do not be too despondent, be resolute, complete key experiments and think of ways to improve your applications for next year.  The grant system is a sort of lottery but the stronger grants in general do better."

Professor Terry O'Brien, Head of School, added, "My commiserations for all the outstanding applicants who were unsuccessful in what was an extremely competitive round (9.5% success nationally) in an increasingly challenging system. Everyone needs to keep faith in their science, continuing to publish well and make an impact, and the grants will come." 

Australian Centre for Blood Diseases 

Professor Harshal Nandurkar is CI for his project, "A novel single treatment for two serious complications of allogeneic stem cell transplantation: acute graft-versus-host disease and sinusoidal obstruction syndrome" which has been awarded $1,863,376. Prof Nandurkar's team includes Simon Robson, Prof David Curtis, Prof Karlheinz Peter, Dr Maithili Sashindranath, Geoffrey Hill, Karen Dwyer, Ronald Sluyter and Debbie Watson.

Department of Diabetes

Dr Zhong-Lin Chai is CI for his project, "New strategy to safely and effectively reduce diabetic kidney disease" which has been awarded $1,162,198. Dr Chai's team includes David Chalmers and Prof Mark Cooper.

Dr Sih Min Tan is CI for her project, "Investigating complement C5a receptor 2 as a therapeutic target for diabetic kidney disease " which has been awarded $855,469. Dr Tan's team members are A/Prof Melinda Coughlan, Dr Elif Ekinci, Trent Woodruff and Ralf Schittenhelm.

Department of Neuroscience 

Prof Patrick Kwan is CI for his project, "Machine learning models for personalised epilepsy management" which is receiving $781,017. Prof Kwan's team members are Dr Ben Chen, Donghao Zhang, Dr Emma Foster, Reza Haffari, David Vaughan, Nicholas Lawn, Dr Piero Perucca, John-Paul Nicolo, Patrick Carney, Martin Brodie, Zongyuan Ge and Alison Anderson.

Dr Mastura Monif is CI for her project, "Glioblastoma - inhibition of P2X7R as a potential therapeutic target for treatment of this aggressive cancer" which is receiving $842,094. Dr Monif's team includes Martin Hunn, Kate Drummond, Prof Catriona McLean, A/Prof Nigel Jones, Paul Sanfilippo, Prof Terry O'Brien.

A/Prof Sandy Shultz is CI for his project, "Brain injury in intimate partner violence: Insight into a silent pandemic" which is receiving $1,924,134. A/Prof Shultz's team members are Michael O'Sullivan, Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Silke Meyer, Paul van Donkelaar, Prof Richelle Mychasiuk, Richelle; Dr Stuart McDonald, Prof Meng Law, Dr Lucy Vivash, Prof Terry O'Brien, Jennie Ponsford, Dr Bianca Jupp, Dr Zhibin Chen, Dr Biswadev Mitra and Jaqueline Mark.