Prestigious grants and prizes awarded

Professor Glenda Halliday received an NHMRC Excellence Award, Professor Hak-Kim Chan was awarded ARC Linkage grants, and Associate Professor Paulo Ferreira was bestowed an NHMRC Partnership grant. Three more academics from the faculty will receive funding from Cancer Council NSW. 

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Duncan Ivison congratulated the academics involved as well as their teams, adding that it highlighted Sydney’s strength in health and medical research and reflected our global rankings of 7th for oncology (US News and World Report 2019) and 18th for medicine (QS Subject rankings 2020). 

NHMRC Excellence Award

Professor Glenda Halliday was awarded the NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award for Clinical Medicine and Science, which recognises Australia’s best female health and medical academics. 

Professor Halliday is an internationally renowned neurodegeneration expert whose research has shaped current international diagnostic criteria and recommendations for patient identification and management. 

Her research is now focused on finding biomarkers that identify under-recognised non-Alzheimer diseases to target with disease modifying strategies. Read more on this award here.

ARC Linkage grants

Professor Hak-Kim Chan was also awarded an ARC Linkage Grant. As a world leader in respiratory drug delivery, he will partner with a Chinese medical equipment company on a $463,000 grant to develop a novel design toolbox that can accurately predict dispersion performance of a range of powder systems for high-dose inhaler devices.

NHMRC Partnership grant

Associate Professor Paulo Ferreira was awarded more than $1.1 million to lead an NHMRC Partnership Project to develop the Get Health Coaching Service to reduce the burden of low back pain.

Australia spends $9 billion annually on low back pain management. The proposed approach aims to improve health services and processes in low back pain management, at low cost, and be readily implementable across Local Health Districts in NSW. 

Cancer Council funding

Three medicine and health academics will each receive around $450,000 in funding from Cancer Council NSW to investigate a range of cancer research questions. 

• Professor Mark Molloy will look at how polyps cause bowel cancer.
• Associate Professor Matthew Naylor will aim to improve identification of aggressive versus slow growing prostate cancer.
• Dr Ulf Schmitz will work to understand how genes are regulated in cancer cells.

Walter and Eliza Hall funding

Associate Professor Anthony Don was one of the first two recipients of the new Walter and Eliza Hall National Drug Discovery Centre funding. He will lead a project to develop new drugs that reverse systemic insulin resistance that causes type 2 diabetes, without the side effect of additional weight gain associated with most existing drugs.