Rod Rickards Fellowship
The Rod Rickards Fellowships are in honour of Professor Rod Rickards (1934–2007), one of the most important contributors to Australian science through his outstanding achievements in the chemistry of compounds of medical, biological, agricultural and veterinary importance. Professor Rickards served on the Academy’s Europe Committee as a member between 1994 and 2002, and as Chair in 2003–2006. Two fellowships are awarded each year to outstanding scientists undertaking research in Europe in the areas of chemistry or biology.
2012
Dr Kathryn Holt
BIo21 Institute
University of Melbourne
Dr Kathryn Holt from the University of Melbourne is one of the 2012 recipients of the Rod Rickards Fellowship. Dr Holt travelled to Paris in October to work with Dr François-Xavier Weill at the Pasteur Institute, where they used high throughput genomics to study the global emergence of a highly drug resistant form of Salmonella associated with consumption of chicken meat. This exciting genomic data was able to explain the abilities of the pathogen to survive in the presence of a wide range of antimicrobial drugs, and showed that this highly adaptive bacterium has gained these abilities many times in different countries, in response to different patterns of antimicrobial usage.
During her visit, Dr Holt and her hosts began a second collaboration to investigate the emergence and global spread of Shigella dysenteriae, the key cause of severe drug-resistant dysentery epidemics which have swept through refugee camps in Asia and Africa. On her way home Dr Holt stopped in Cambridge to present some recent work on other drug resistant pathogens. Shortly after returning to Australia, Dr Holt moved to the Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne to start her own genomics lab, and was awarded four NHMRC research grants that will use genomics in a variety of ways to study human infections.
2012
Dr Jennifer Koh
Department of Biomedical and Molecular Biosciences
University of Technology Sydney
As joint recipient of the Fellowship for 2012, Dr Jennifer Koh, from the University of Technology Sydney, visted Dr Pierre Escoubas at VenomeTech in France in October to conduct research on developing peptide toxins as therapeutics and biopesticides.
2010-2011
Dr Justin Boddey
Department of Infection and Immunity
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
Dr Justin Boddey from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research was a 2010–2011 recipient of the Fellowship. Dr Boddey travelled to Portugal to work with Dr Maria Mota at the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa. During his visit in October–December, Dr Boddey conducted research on the protein export by malaria parasites during liver cell infection.
The project supported by the fellowship has progressed in many exciting ways that will result in up to three co-authored publications. Dr Boddey’s expertise in liver-stage research has allowed him to be promoted to Faculty within the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and he now heads his own laboratory within the Division of Infection and Immunity, studying liver-stage malaria. He has established eight international collaborations and successfully obtained five research grants from the ARC, NHMRC, Ramaciotti Foundation and Human Frontier Science Program to support his research. He presented his preliminary data in five lectures in 2011.
2010-2011
Professor Barbara Messerle
School of Chemistry
University of New South Wales
Professor Barbara Messerle from the University of New South Wales was joint recipient of the Rod Rickards Fellowship for 2010–2011 was. Professor Messerle travelled to Scotland to visit Professor Stuart Macgregor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and to France to visit Professor Odile Eisenstein at the Université Montpellier 2. During March–April 2011, Professor Messerle conducted research on the rational design of bimetallic catalysts for efficient synthesis.
Catalysts enhance the economic viability and the energy efficiency of chemical transformations by increasing the rates of reactions under mild conditions, and members of Professor Messerle’s research team at the University of New South Wales are working on the development of bimetallic homogeneous catalysts for multiple step reactions which are designed to provide enhanced reaction rates. The collaborations with Professors Macgregor and Eisenstein enable her and her team to understand the mechanisms of the catalysed reactions and also the structures of the catalysts and how the structures will influence the rates of the reactions. During the visit, one of Professor Messerle’s PhD students was able to join her in Scotland and they were able to initiate some research that has now shown that for the catalysts they have been studying that have two metal centres, the relative enhancement of catalytic reaction rate is specifically dependent on the distance between the two metal centres. This has helped Professor Messerle and her team in designing new and more effective catalysts which they have tested recently. Professors Eisenstein and Macgregor are world leaders in the development of a theoretical understanding of catalysed reactions, and their input to the research has been invaluable.
2010
Dr Rosanne Guijt
School of Pharmacy
University of Tasmania
Dr Rosanne Guijt from the University of Tasmania travelled to Switzerland in May–July 2010 as recipient of the Rod Rickards Fellowship for that year. Dr Guijt conducted research on the evaluation of a new but simple manufacturing method to improve sensitivity in contactless conductivity detection with Professor Peter Hauser at the University of Basel.
The evaluation of the technology developed at the University of Tasmania with the electronics available in Professor Hauser’s laboratories allowed a good, fundamental evaluation of the new technology and led to the publication of her paper ‘Microfluidic chips for capillary electrophoresis with integrated electrodes for capacitively coupled conductivity detection based on printed circuit board technology’.
