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Australia Fellowship for WEHI’s Professor Terry Speed

 

Senator Jan McLucas, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing, has announced that Professor Terry Speed is the recipient of a prestigious Australia Fellowship.

A total of twelve Australia Fellowships for biological scientists were announced by Senator McLucas, with each Fellowship having a value of $4 million over five years. The funding is to enable some of Australia’s most outstanding and creative researchers to pursue their research interests in Australia.

Professor Speed has hitherto divided his research time between the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. The Fellowship will enable Professor Speed to conduct his research entirely within Australia.

Professor Speed, who is Head of the Bioinformatics Division at WEHI, briefly describes his scientific discipline as being the point where mathematics meets biology. In broad terms, Professor Speed and his colleagues use mathematical and computational skills to interpret

the data generated by biological investigations and experiments.

The recent achievements of the Bioinformatics Division include:

• the identification of members of a class of genes involved in the transport of deadly malaria parasites to the red blood cells of the human host;
• a significant contribution to a better understanding of the mechanism of drugs that inhibit tumour growth; and
• helping to identify the location of faulty genes in families that carry a genetic disease.

Reflecting upon the news of Professor Speed’s Australia Fellowship, Professor Suzanne Cory, the Director of WEHI, commented, “Bioinformatics is an increasingly key aspect of biomedical research but its practitioners remain in very short supply. WEHI was delighted to recruit Professor Speed in 1997 to initiate and lead the development of our Bioinformatics Division. It is wonderful that the Australia Fellowship will enable him to now spend 100% of his research effort here. This will also benefit many groups around the nation. Speed’s links with key centres in the US and elsewhere will remain strong, which will assist Australian scientists to perform at the cutting edge in this rapidly evolving field.”

For further information

Penny Fannin
Strategic Communications Manager
Ph: +61 3 9345 2345
Mob: 0417 125 700
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

 

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