Applications for the 2010 L’Oréal Australia For Women In Science Fellowships have now closed.
Below is the April bulletin for 2010.
We’re pleased to include progress reports on our 2009 Fellows. As you will read, their work spans the full extent of space and time—from Marnie’s studies on how genes are controlled, through Tamara’s exploration of dark matter in the Universe, to Zenobia’s use of single grains of sand to time Australia’s pre-history.
More below:
L’Oréal Australia Fellowships in 2010
The $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships are to help early-career women scientists consolidate their careers and rise to leadership positions.
They are awarded to women who have shown excellence in their scientific careers and who have an appropriate research plan that will be assisted by the one-year Fellowship.
The L’Oréal Australia For Women In Science Fellowships are now in their fourth year. They are supported by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, and are highly competitive.
James Bradfield Moody joins jury panel
Dr James Bradfield Moody has joined the jury panel for the L’Oréal Australia For Women In Science Fellowships representing UNESCO. James, the Executive Director of Development at CSIRO, is currently serving as Chair of Science of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO. He is also a regular panellist on the ABC television program The New Inventors.
In addition to these roles, James is a member of the Advisory Board of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Advisory Council of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He is also a board member of the Brisbane Institute in Queensland. His career has included positions at FedSat, the Australian Satellite launched from Japan in 2002, and at Natural Resource Intelligence, which provided organisations with information to assist them to monitor and evaluate land and natural resources. He joined CSIRO in 2004.
Updates from Australian Fellows
The 2009 Fellows are halfway through their Fellowships. Here is what they have achieved.
Marnie Blewitt
Marnie returned to full-time research early in 2010 after the birth of her son Finn in September 2009. While on maternity leave, Marnie’s Fellowship provided money for technical support in her laboratory. This allowed her to establish the special techniques needed to identify the enzymes that switch genes on and off.
Initially, Marnie will test 180 different enzymes for their potential roles in controlling gene activity in blood stem cells. Ultimately, she plans to identify the genes involved in the inactivation of one of the two X chromosomes carried in every female cell.
Marnie has also reached some significant career milestones in recent months. Late last year, she received an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship—one of only 20 awarded annually across all disciplines. It will provide her with five years of salary support.
She also became the youngest female laboratory head at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, appointed to lead a research group within the Division of Molecular Medicine.
In addition, she was awarded the inaugural Dyson Fellowship, which provides her with $100,000 a year over five years towards the costs of running her laboratory.
Finally, Marnie attended the National Youth Science Forum in Canberra in January, where she talked to Year 12 students about the role of women in science.
Tamara Davis
Tamara has recently been promoted to a permanent faculty position at the University of Queensland, allowing her to focus on her astronomy research programs. She has published four papers on the huge star explosions known as supernovae and on the large-scale structure of the Universe, and she has several other papers and articles in progress.
Tamara’s Fellowship is primarily being used to finance a workshop which will bring experts together from around the world to develop a research plan to use supernovae data from Australia’s Skymapper telescope to measure dark matter. Planning is well under way and the workshop will be held in September this year.
Another outcome from her Fellowship is an unexpected collaboration with the radio astronomy community who hope to use the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (currently under construction) and ultimately the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array (to be built in Australia or South Africa) to achieve similar aims.
In August, Tamara is off to Europe to attend a three-week workshop on cosmology as one of 33 invited participants.
Zenobia Jacobs
Zenobia has focused on using her single-grain-of-sand technique to date samples from the eight earliest known archaeological sites in Australia. Once that task is complete, she will apply the same kind of statistical analysis that she previously used on samples from southern Africa. The results of her studies may provide clues to the original human colonisation of Australia.
Zenobia has recently been awarded an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship for a project in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
In November, she became the first woman to win the Sir Nicholas Shackleton medal awarded every two years to a young researcher by the International Union for Quaternary Research. And she has published several papers on her ongoing research projects on the African Stone Age.
International Laureates announced
The winners of the 2010 L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards attended a presentation ceremony in Paris on 4 March 2010.
The five Laureates are:
Africa & the Arab States: Rashika El Ridi, Professor at Cairo University in Egypt, for paving the way towards the development of a vaccine against the tropical disease Schistomiasis/Bilharzia.
Asia-Pacific: Lourdes J. Cruz, Professor at the Marine Science Institute at the University of the Philippines, Diliman in the Philippines, for the discovery of marine snail toxins that can serve as powerful tools to study brain function.
North America: Elaine Fuchs, Professor at The Rockefeller University in the United States, for her contributions to our knowledge of skin biology and skin stem cells.
Europe: Anne Dejean-Assémat, Professor at the Pasteur Institute in France, for her contributions to our understanding of leukaemia and liver cancers.
Latin America: Alejandra Bravo, Professor at the Institute of Molecular Microbiology of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for her work on a bacterial toxin that acts as a powerful insecticide.
They were chosen from nominations made by a network of almost 1000 members of the international scientific community. A jury of 18 eminent scientists selected the final winners from the shortlisted applicants. They were led by Professor Günter Blobel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1999,
“For a dozen years, the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards have recognised and promoted exceptional women who, by the excellence of their research, contribute to the advancement of science.” Professor Blobel said.
“As we announce the laureates of the 2010 Awards, we are very proud to note that two laureates of the 2008 Awards will receive 2009 Nobel Prizes. The L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards laureates are among world’s best scientific talents and will serve as role models for the future of science.”
If you would like more information on L’Oréal’s work overseas or in Australia, please contact Megan Ryan on (03) 8680 0003 or visit www.forwomeninscience.com
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