Bio21 Researchers each win highly prestigious ARC Future Fellowships
10 Sep 09
Bio21 Institute, University of Melbourne researchers Dr John Gehman from the School of Chemistry and Dr Matt Perugini and Dr Stuart Ralph from Department of Biochemistry have each won a highly prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship, as announced by The Hon Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 9 September.
Over a five-year period (2009 -2013), ARC Future Fellowships offer four-year fellowships of up to $135,000 a year to 1,000 outstanding Australian and international researchers in the middle of their career.
The Australian Government launched the, ARC Future Fellowships scheme to promote research in areas of national importance by giving outstanding researchers incentives to conduct their research in Australia. By attracting and retaining the best and brightest mid-career researchers the scheme is aimed at significantly boost Australia's research and innovation capacity.
John Gehman will conduct research with global implications aimed at considerably expanding the fundamental capability of experimental techniques for the materials in the solid state using NMR spectroscopy. This will have important implication for life -therapeutic strategies aimed at pharmaceutical targets embedded in cell membranes, research into protein misfolding disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons, and ‘green' plastics and advanced polymers.
Matt Perugini's research will provide insight into the sustainability of marine microorganisms that play an important role in Australia's diverse ecosystem, the development and applications of frontier technologies including high-performance computing on the world's largest supercomputer facility for life science research, and knowledge impacting on the discovery of novel antibiotics that target pathogenic bacteria, like Golden Staph. The Fellowship also gives the opportunity to train several young Australians in highly sought after skills, including bacteriology, biophysics, enzymology, molecular biology, molecular modelling, protein chemistry and structural biology.
Stuart Ralph will further research Malaria, a major worldwide infectious disease. The disease kills around 2 million people every year, and current drugs are increasingly failing due to parasite drug resistance, creating an urgent demand for new drugs, that inhibit different targets. Stuart will study a new class of parasite drug targets, the transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA) synthetase enzymes to find novel inhibitors. Compounds blocking these enzymes may lead to new drugs to combat malaria.
Read more about the research of John Gehman, Research Fellow in the Separovic Group, Matt Perugini and Stuart Ralph.
