Pursuit: Seeking answers to global challenges through research and innovation

WATER WISE The global quest for the technology to transform our drying climate

Pursuit

Seeking answers to global challenges through research and innovation

GENE CHANGE Fast tracking the discovery and treatment of epilepsy

CONVERGENCE OF IDEAS Pitting 10,000 minds against the greatest challenges in medicine

Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The University of Melbourne

OVER MORE THAN A CENTURY as an independent nation, Australia has proven adept at developing wealth for many of its citizens, and an environment that’s attractive to generations of visitors and immigrants, as well as the Australian-born. Building on their historic foundation as British institutions, Australia’s leading research universities have played a central role in this rapid but brief history of a nation’s social development.

Some stories of research success stand out, such as the world-changing breakthroughs in hearing research led by the University of Melbourne’s Professor Graeme Clark, inventor of the cochlear implant in the 1970s.

Such successes occur in an active, competitive national culture of scholarship, experiment and discovery, which continues on campus today.

As you might expect at an Australian university, sport is popular.

Yet beneath one of our central sport centres on the Parkville campus, there is a geothermal energy experiment using a ground-source heat pump. This is part of a demonstration exercise aimed at verifying the potential application of a valuable renewable energy source within buildings in one of Australia’s largest cities. In turn, in the Latrobe Valley to Melbourne’s south-east, one of the world’s major sources of brown coal provides a focal point for a larger-scale geothermal energy research exercise involving researchers including Professor Rachel Webster from the University of Melbourne’s School of Physics. Projects such as these promote a vital culture of pure and applied research.

For the University of Melbourne, elements of success include a well-resourced campus located in the centre of a four-million strong city, strong global connections with students and academic staff from more than 100 countries, and a vast disciplinary spread, which includes: the creative arts, music and humanities; professional education in law, medicine, engineering and business; and expertise in the sciences.

Whatever your own specialisation, I hope you find something of interest among the many research stories prepared for you here.

Kym Smith, News Limited

Professor Glyn Davis AC

News Bird helpers boot out parasites

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Hot rocks offer a renewable energy supply

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Enriching interaction with the digital world

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Kicking a global habit

Pursuit

Seeking answers to global challenges through research and innovation

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Intelligent technology helps manage natural disasters

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Genetic marker predicts severity of new flu

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Top teachers take education further

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Indigenous housing by design

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The University of Melbourne has used its best endeavours to ensure that the material contained in this publication was correct at the time of printing. The University gives no warranty and accepts no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of information and the University reserves the right to make changes without notice at any time in its absolute discretion.

Young guns The next big thing Younger researchers at the University of Melbourne may have big shoes to fill, but they are making rapid progress toward the top of their game

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Features On the waterfront Breakthrough technology and new partnerships across the ocean are forging a new way forward in managing the growing global water crisis Deciphering epilepsy From predicting seizures to pinpointing genes, researchers are making huge leaps in understanding the causes and processes involved in epilepsy Under the radar Bowel cancer is Australia’s second biggest cancer killer, yet its threat is under-communicated and screening remains a challenge. Now, new research is changing the way we think about this deadly disease

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Contact Us The University of Melbourne Lara McKay, Director University Marketing lara.mckay@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Lloyd Hollenberg Deputy Director of the Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology

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Professor Alan Pert Director of the Melbourne School of Design

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Professor Doug Hilton Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

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Professor Tim Lindsey Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law

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Published and produced by The University of Melbourne and Refraction Media Pty Ltd

Copyright © 2014 The University of Melbourne All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner or form without written permission.

In partnership

PUBLISHER Karen Taylor

Critical mass A powerhouse of 10,000 minds focusing on today’s health imperatives, the Parkville Precinct is one the world’s top biomedical hubs — and an example of how co-location is crucial for blending teaching, research and clinical practice

ART DIRECTOR Kat Power

The convergence of ideas The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research is a hub of multidisciplinary teamwork that yields real-world applications

EDITOR Heather Catchpole PHOTOGRAPHER Tina Smigielski ADDITIONAL EDITING Robin McKie SUB-EDITORS Keira Daley, Rivqa Rafael

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Profiles Professor Graeme Clark Laureate Professor Emeritus, Melbourne School of Engineering Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research

This issue went to press on 19 March 2014

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Bird helpers boot out parasites

Cuckoos, like this one being fed by a warbler, parasitise other species’ nests.

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

“The bronze cuckoos are what we call ‘evicting parasites’. The cuckoo nestlings push the fairy wren’s eggs out of the nest.”

The superb fairy wren uses teamwork to raise offspring and keep nest invaders at bay.

“Large groups [of superb fairy wrens] were more vigilant around their nest, spent more time mobbing the cuckoo than smaller groups, and ultimately were less likely to be parasitised. Thus, superb fairy wrens possess cuckoo-specific nest defences, which are enhanced by helper contributions and which can explain the lower parasitism rates experienced by large groups,” they state in the paper.

Globally, brood parasites and cooperative breeders are found concentrated together in regions of Australasia and sub-Saharan Africa. Research into the evolutionary links between these species also shows that there is a higher proportion of cooperative birds among species that were parasitised in contrast to those that weren’t.

The researchers have yet to determine the extent that these species have influenced each other biologically.

“It can work both ways, so we don’t know for certain whether birds started breeding cooperatively because of brood parasites or vice versa,” adds Hall. “This study injects a new vigour and new ideas that can be tested in other species to see if this theory holds there as well.”

— Sophie Schmidt Science journal article: bit.ly/LNxSg5

David Cook; Michelle Hall; Alamy

Researchers have discovered why some birds share their nests with relatives — it’s a strategy to combat invasions by birds such as cuckoos, which, as ‘brood parasites’, lay their eggs in the nests of other species. The habit of three or more individuals helping raise young in a nest, called ‘cooperative breeding’, occurs in around 9% of all avian species.

The study, published in Science in December 2013, indicates that when a bird or several birds join a breeding pair in a nest, these ‘collaborative breeders’ lose out because they do not pass on their own genes directly.

However, by helping their relatives, their genes are maintained, indirectly, in future generations.

In an international collaboration with the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge, University of Melbourne scientists Dr Michelle Hall and Associate Professor Raoul Mulder studied the superb fairy wren, a species common in south-eastern Australia.

Superb fairy wrens are targets for a brood parasite species called the Horsfield’s bronze cuckoo, which lays its eggs in fairy wren nests.

The fairy wrens then unwittingly raise the cuckoos’ young.

“The bronze cuckoos are what we call ‘evicting parasites’,” Hall explains. “The cuckoo nestlings push the fairy wren’s eggs out of the nest.”

Fairy wrens attempt to stop cuckoos laying eggs in their nests by mobbing them, with only mixed effectiveness.

Success rates increased, however, when there were more than two helpers present, suggesting that cooperative breeding could be a defence evolved by fairy wrens to block cuckoos from laying their eggs.

News

Hot rocks offer a renewable energy supply

Science Photo Library/Illustration Evgeniy Yatskov

Rich in coal, Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, 150 km east of Melbourne, is already responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity generation. But University of Melbourne researchers say the region’s unique geology may also hold the key to a low-carbon future.

Geothermal energy technology — where electricity is generated by pumping water through hot rocks beneath the ground — is a less-developed source of renewable energy than wind and solar, but once established, could be a major source of cheap and reliable electricity. The UK and Australia both aim to use renewables in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050.

Professor Rachel Webster from the University of Melbourne’s School of Physics says the Latrobe Valley is the ideal setting for geothermal energy. Here, a 500 m-thick blanket of brown coal — which is an ultra-effective geological insulator — has locked in significant amounts of heat at unusually shallow depths, making geothermal power a more realistic proposition.

“It turns out that the thickest layer of brown coal on the globe, pretty much bar none, is in the Latrobe Valley,” says Webster, who is working with colleagues from the School of Earth Sciences. “Nowhere else in the world is taking advantage of this sort of insulation,” Webster says of the region, which already has the infrastructure for electricity transmission.

Webster and her colleagues have investigated the feasibility of two strategies that make use of

the existing infrastructure and support a gradual transition towards a 100% renewable energy future.

These scaled-down approaches minimise costs by drilling to shallow depths, accessing cooler temperatures than typically used in geothermal power generation.

They also enable geothermal technology to be developed and refined along the way.

In the first strategy, coal-fired power stations are supplied with preheated 100–120°C water pumped from up to 2.5 km below the surface. The researchers estimate a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and a saving of A$1.5 billion over the first 10–15 years of a facility’s operation.

A second pilot study has shown that the 75°C water pumped from 900 m beneath the ground, just under the brown coal blanket, can produce half a megawatt — enough to power more than 650 households.

Additional incentivising, such as taxing carbon emissions, is needed to fully realise Latrobe Valley’s promise. Meanwhile, Webster’s colleagues are looking at options closer to home — trials are currently taking place on campus using cool ground temperatures as a source of air-conditioning in new buildings, and they hope this process can be upscaled to provide air-conditioning and heating for larger precincts.

— Jude Dineley Rachel Webster talks to ABC’s Robyn Williams: tinyurl.com/q4j884n

Researchers, including Professor Rachel Webster (above), have devised strategies to make geothermal power a viable option in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.

News

Enriching interaction with the digital world

Natural User Interfaces humanise your gadgets and can enhance social interactions.

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

While the centre will not be restricted to working with particular devices, Professor Vetere says researchers are attracted to the Kinect, which is still primarily associated with video games. They plan to explore how this device could strengthen social interaction.

These innovative interactions won’t just be limited to work or the home; they could also take place in public spaces and in the medical area, helping train surgeons in virtual operating theatres, bringing expert triage care to remote areas, or helping children with cerebral palsy, for example. Significant developments have already been made with NUI technology in the UK, Professor Vetere explains, with surgeons now able to engage directly with medical images in operating theatres.

“I’m not advocating that we lose the keyboard entirely, but there’s an opportunity to do new and different things.”

— Laura Boness Centre website: socialnui.unimelb.edu.au

“Social NUIs make technology work for people rather than people working for technology.”

iStockphoto

The University of Melbourne is set to play a major role in the development of new social interactive technologies with its new Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces (NUI).

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect use NUI technologies, enabling users to interact through voice, touch and gestures. Professor Frank Vetere, the centre’s Director, says they will explore existing technologies in novel ways to enhance social interactions.

Launched December 2013, the research centre is an $8 million collaboration — established to last at least three years — between the University of Melbourne, Microsoft and the Victorian Government. The centre will focus on social uses and applications of NUI technologies.

The University has collaborated with Microsoft previously, and the centre developed from these ties as well as state government support. Tony Hey, Vice President at Microsoft Research, says he’s confident the centre will open the floodgates for innovative social uses of NUI. The research team will also identify how people would prefer to interact with these devices and with each other.

“Social NUIs humanise technology. They make technology work for people rather than people working for technology,” he says.

Profile

Professor Graeme Clark AC Two features stand out in the otherwise sparsely decorated office of Professor Graeme Clark. The first is the more recent: a statuette marking the 2013 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award that was given to the neurophysiologist for his pioneering work in restoring hearing and speech to around 320,000 profoundly deaf people worldwide.

The award honours visionaries whose insight and perseverance has led to significant advances in preventing disease, reducing disability and diminishing suffering. It holds pride of place in Clark’s office at the Melbourne School of Engineering.

The other featured item in Clark’s office is a framed photograph of Rod Saunders, the first recipient of his cochlear implant. A skilled surgeon, Clark implanted the multichannel device into Saunders’ inner ear in 1978 at Melbourne’s Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. The invention saw Clark make a phenomenal impact in reducing suffering and disability.

The operation was a remarkable success and heralded the beginning of a new industry in multidisciplinary collaboration on bionic devices. Clark’s success with the cochlear implant has benefitted research in other areas, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and bionic eyes. When Saunders heard for the first time — not just sounds but clear speech — it was the first time

technology had interfaced with human consciousness. Clark says he was so overcome with emotion he went into the lab next door and “burst into tears of joy”.

Clark trained as an ear, nose and throat specialist and surgeon in Australia and then overseas. He returned home to research the physiology of the brain and was appointed Australia’s first chair of otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne in the early 1970s. He spent the next few decades perfecting and commercialising the modern cochlear implant and arranging funding for his company, Cochlear Limited.

Clark’s drive is undiminished today and he continues to work in new research that aims to improve hearing and fine-tune the interactions between technology and the nerve endings of the human body. This convergence between engineering and biology is “one of the most exciting things” he says, as humanity attempts to address one of science’s last big mysteries — the workings of the human brain.

“The Lasker Award means that I have time to now be more reflective and take an overview of the research and see what its implications are,” he says. “That’s one of the exciting things, seeing evidence of a greater picture and asking, what does that picture tell us?” — Heather Catchpole

Tina Smigielski

Laureate Professor Emeritus, Melbourne School of Engineering

Feature

On the

waterfront Breakthrough technology and new partnerships across the ocean are forging a new way forward in managing the growing global water crisis.

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HE FIRST GLIMPSE Professor Peter Scales had of China’s mighty Haihe river basin was from the back of a small bus on a highway heading out of Beijing in early June 2013. Scales, the Deputy Dean of the Melbourne School of Engineering, is an expert in water quality, and the Australian co-director of the new Australia–China Joint Research Centre on River Basin Management. He and a delegation of colleagues were in China to witness some of the challenges the world’s most populous country is facing when it comes to water resources.

Stretching across 300,000 km2, the Haihe river basin supplies 10% of China’s total agricultural output. Its produce feeds around 130 million people in China each year.

From the bus, Scales could see fields and paddies cultivated by farmers as they have done for centuries. He recalls being struck by how healthy the farmland looked. The crops were green and flourishing, irrigation channels full and farmers busy.

But he knew that appearances were deceiving. The valley suffers from worrying water shortages, serious pollution and degradation. Over the past half-century, the Haihe region’s river run-off has dropped by almost half and total water resources have declined by nearly a third.

THE HAIHE BASIN’S problems are emblematic of an enormous challenge China faces across its vast northern regions. By global standards, the country is desperately short of water.

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

“ In China, more than half of agricultural land is irrigated, so food security and water security are the same thing.”

Home to 21% of the world’s population, it has only 9% of the globe’s cultivated land and just 6% of its water resources.

Despite this, China has made “exceptional progress” with its meagre water resources, the World Bank noted in a 2013 report, constructing nearly 30,000 km of river dykes and more than 87,000 reservoirs to help bring an estimated 400 million people out of poverty. Yet the global finance body says China will need to make huge efforts to ensure water shortages do not hinder further development, particularly in the context of climate change.

“Development in northern China is critically dependent on the fact that they need to change the amount of productivity they get out of water,” says Scales.

“In China, about half of agricultural land is irrigated, so food security and water security are the same thing,” explains Professor Zhongjing Wang, from Tsinghua University’s Department of Hydraulic Engineering. It’s important to make full use of every drop of water to support crop production, he adds.

Smart flow control gates in China (below left) and Australia (right and bottom) save water at the source.

Southern Rural Water/Rubicon/University of Melbourne

The Australia–China Joint Research Centre on River Basin Management, launched in May 2013 and co-funded by the Chinese and Australian governments, will contribute to this effort by sharing experience, technologies and research projects to help both countries address national priorities for water resources management.

“This is about taking the skills that we have in Australia to a place where it can have the biggest impact,” says Scales.

The centre evolved out of the connections that developed over seven years between researchers at the University of Melbourne and scientists across China.

Professor Bojie Fu, one of the centre’s co-founders and a Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, notes that “by building strong links and networks through staff and student exchange, and mutual research endeavour, we can help each other optimise our water management”.

An important outcome of those exchanges has been the development of an international course on river basin management for Chinese and Australian students, taught collaboratively by academics from the University of Melbourne, Tsinghua University, and other institutions. The course has been well received by students and university leaders alike.

SINCE 2006, REGULAR exchanges of Australian scientists to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and China Agricultural University, have allowed Australian scientists to understand the Chinese context. More than 300 Chinese visitors to around 40 organisations in Australia — including government departments, research organisations, river basin bureaus and water industries — have introduced Chinese water managers to Australian approaches and technologies.

The centre now brings together expertise from both countries. Across Australia, this includes the national research organisation CSIRO, the Murray–Darling Basin Authority and the University of Western Sydney, in addition to the University of Melbourne. In China, 10 partners, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry for Water Resources and Tsinghua University, support the centre.

In hydrological and physical terms, China and Australia face common challenges, particularly the problems of water scarcity in north China and south-east Australia. In social and economic terms, the two countries have different approaches to solving these problems, yet it’s exactly those differences that experts believe can be harnessed to benefit both countries.

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

Closer ties with China are enabling Australia to benefit from shared knowledge on river basin management.

“We can share the different experiences and learn from each other,” says Dr Yongping Wei, a senior research fellow at the centre. “In particular, the University of Melbourne’s water group has been recognised by Chinese agencies as having a very good whole-of-system approach to solving river basin problems.”

That’s a view shared by Professor Wu Bingfang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, whose expertise is in using satellite technology to assess regional water balance. “The University of Melbourne has a great deal of experience working on the Murray–Darling basin, and Australia’s work in that basin leads the world in terms of basin management, especially in developing water markets, allocating water to the environment and predicting water yields in the context of climate change,” he explains. “All this technology is very useful for China.”

At the same time, Wu says, China has developed its own technologies, many of which may be useful for Australia and the rest of the world.

ONE AUSTRALIAN TECHNOLOGY that has ignited particular interest in China is a revolutionary irrigation management system designed by engineers at the University of Melbourne and Rubicon Water.

The result of 14 years of collaboration, the Total Channel Control system modernises irrigation infrastructure by measuring, modelling and managing water flow. Globally, about 70% of all water is transported via open channels, mostly in highly inefficient systems managed by manually operated gates.

Feature

Shutterstock

By contrast, Total Channel Control uses solar-powered FlumeGates, which feature integrated sensors and software to control and monitor the flow and depth of water distributed through irrigation channels. It has been shown to operate at near 90% water efficiency. The technology has won many awards, including one from the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2008.

“The ultimate aim is to allow open channel water resources to be managed so that they behave almost like water flowing from a tap,” says Professor Iven Mareels, Dean of Engineering at the University of Melbourne and the project’s research leader.

He adds that the Total Channel Control system gets close to achieving that efficiency goal by linking the automated FlumeGates in an irrigation region via a wireless radio network,

In China’s remote northern Gansu province, far from the Haihe basin, the Australia–China Centre has already begun pilot schemes in three river basins — Heihe, Shule and Shiyang. These three basins share similar ecological issues, including climate change, water scarcity, ecological degradation, and conflicts between different water use sectors. In some places, the problems have become severe enough that whole communities have been relocated.

The University of Melbourne group has brought to these inland river basins a whole-of-system approach that was developed from the University’s involvement in the drought-prone Murray–Darling basin.

“Understanding what the total capacity for water use is in a region, putting a water market in place that provides

More than two-thirds of the world’s water is transported via highly inefficient open channels.

“The University of Melbourne’s water group has been recognised by Chinese agencies as having a very good whole-of-system approach to solving river basin problems.” allowing flows and water levels to be constantly adjusted to meet the farmers’ water requirements while avoiding waste.

The system forms the backbone of the A$2 billion Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project. Interest has also been generated internationally, with Rubicon opening offices in the US, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and China to meet demand.

“This is research delivering real results,” says Rubicon co-founder and director David Aughton. “The University has been practical enough to make sure it can deliver in the commercial sense.”

NOBODY EXPECTS THAT IMPROVING efficiency in irrigation will solve the water crisis in China or anywhere else by itself.

New technology needs to be combined with assessments of the total regional water balance and water-trading systems that help drive changes in behaviour, says Scales.

Water markets are known to be an effective way to make water users become more efficient, because they put a value on the water being consumed. Such systems started nearly 30 years ago in Australia and are now used in places like the Murray–Darling basin, but they are unheard of in China.

a value for the water, then putting technologies in place that allow you to be a lot more efficient — that’s the matrix of things we’re doing in the centre,” says Scales.

So far the trials have been small, but they are expanding.

This year, 40–50 FlumeGates in Total Channel Control systems will be installed in a region covering 6000 hectares, together with water trading systems involving two irrigation districts in the Shiyang river basin. Already the results are promising, with water markets driving a 50% saving in water use from one season to the next, says Scales.

The pilot projects have also affected the way water is thought of in the region. One local Chinese water bureau manager explains: “Now I fully understand what ‘no measurement, no management’ means, which I heard from an Australian colleague.”

In 2014, these early steps will come substantially closer to China’s agricultural heartland, with plans to begin similar integrated approaches in the Haihe basin. Scales says that the next time he finds himself gliding down one of the region’s highways, they will be well underway.

— Stephen Pincock

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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Walter and Eliza Hall Institute CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering

The Royal Women’s Hospital The Royal Melbourne Hospital and Melbourne Health

The University of Melbourne

CriticalMass

A powerhouse of 10,000 minds focusing on today’s health imperatives, the Parkville Precinct is one the world’s top biomedical hubs — and an example of how co-location is crucial for blending teaching, research and clinical practice.

Tina Smigielski

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igital communication is bringing people together and making the world smaller than ever, “but at the end of the day there’s no substitute for bumping into someone at the coffee shop,” says Professor Mark Hargreaves, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research Partnerships).

The physical proximity of 24 “remarkable entities” underlies the success of the Parkville Precinct in Melbourne, he says. This region places 10,000 staff in major teaching hospitals, medical research institutes and biotechnology companies within walking distance of each other.

“You bring highly talented people together and they spark off each other. That influences the students, and they become the next generation of clinicians and researchers with strong backgrounds in biomedical research who put new ideas into medical practice and commercial developments,” he says.

Parkville is the largest biomedical precinct in the Southern Hemisphere, and has attracted more than A$5 billion investment

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by government, the University, health services, biomedical research institutions and philanthropists over recent years.

“We have a collection here which potentially rivals some of the great biomedical precincts of the world — Boston, London, San Diego,” Hargreaves says.

He adds that the “power of the precinct” is demonstrated by the development of a gum disease vaccine. When Professor Eric Reynolds, head of Melbourne Dental School, gave a lecture at Parkville on his discovery of a bacterium that causes serious gum disease, and the potential for a vaccine against it, Dr Graham Mitchell was sitting in the audience. He and Reynolds had been PhD students at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Parkville, and Mitchell had worked as a research director at CSL Ltd — a biotechnology company, also in the precinct, at the cutting-edge of vaccine development.

Mitchell suggested that Reynolds approach CSL about developing a vaccine.

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

That chance encounter has resulted in a vaccine that is now undergoing preclinical trials in a partnership between CSL and pharmaceutical company, Sanofi Pasteur.

The people and resources side by side at the precinct have also helped the University of Melbourne Department of Pathology’s Professor Melissa Southey translate academic research into tangible results. For 20 years, her quest has been to identify the genes underlying breast cancers that run in families.

“I was head of the genetic testing laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in the mid-nineties, just as the first predisposition genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) were being described,” she says. In 2016, Peter Mac will move to new purpose-built premises in Parkville, with the latest facilities for cancer research, treatment and education.

Despite the discovery of these two breast cancer genes, Southey knew all too well they could only account for some of the

In partnership CSL Limited Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and The Royal Children’s Hospital

St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research and st vincent’s hospital melbourne The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

familial breast cancer cases, and set out to find more predisposing genes. For this, she drew on information provided by another institution in the precinct, the Victorian Cancer Registry (VCR), where details of every cancer case in Victoria are recorded.

A study led by two of her precinct colleagues (Professors Graham Giles and John Hopper) had used the VCR to invite all women diagnosed with breast cancer and their families to participate in research. About 85% of the women volunteered to take part and provided blood samples. With DNA available, and thanks to major advances in DNA sequencing technology over the past decade, Southey was able to obtain complete DNA sequences (genomes) of women in breast cancer-prone families.

Soon, she was knocking on the door of another neighbour, the Life Sciences Computation Centre (LSCC), where she worked closely with its head, Associate Professor Andrew Lonie. The LSCC is part of the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, home to

an IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer. There’s a lot of maths involved in searching through genomes from people with the same disease, trying to find any unusual gene sequences they have in common — and the precinct had the resources she needed. The result, two decades after she began her quest, has been the discovery of at least two more breast cancer genes (XRCC2 and RINT1).

Southey has also worked closely with Professor Ingrid Winship, a clinical geneticist based at another Parkville local, the Royal Melbourne Hospital, to determine the risk associated with various breast cancer genes.

Their work means that women in families prone to breast cancer are now also tested for mutations in a gene called PALB2, which confer a 40% lifetime risk for the disease.

Knowing people in the Parkville Precinct has been a significant factor in her success, says Southey. “I meet these people for lunch nearly every day.” Now that’s something the digital world hasn’t yet mastered. — Clare Pain

The convergence of ideas The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research is a hub of multidisciplinary teamwork that yields real-world applications.

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short stroll west from the University of Melbourne campus takes visitors to the towering glass facade of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Founded in 1915, the institute, known as WEHI, is renowned for the role it has played in making important advances in understanding the roots of cancer, the immune system and infectious diseases.

WEHI is the University’s department of Medical Biology in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. The institute stands in the heart of the Parkville Precinct, one of the world’s most concentrated biomedical research hubs.

Medical breakthroughs at WEHI have included the discovery of the rotavirus and colony stimulating factors (CSF) that have been used to treat over nine million chemotherapy patients. The commercialisation of CSF is a prime example of WEHI’s approach in translating clinical research into patient treatments.

The work of Professor Alan Cowman (pictured far right), head of the Institute’s Infection and Immunity division and an Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne, is another such example. Cowman has devoted his career

In partnership

to understanding the life cycle of the malaria parasite — in particular, the way the parasite evades the human immune system and develops resistance to drugs.

Cowman is working with colleagues in Australia, the US and Europe to develop vaccines against the disease.

Globally, malaria kills around 600,000 people a year, most of them children under five. Cowman and his collaborators’ work has led to clinical trials for one vaccine and preclinical development for a second.

He is driven by both the medical importance of vaccines and an intellectual curiosity about behaviour of the malaria parasite itself. “There are so many interesting problems there,” he says.

Last year, Cowman was selected out of 29 nominees from 11 countries to receive the Mahathir Science Award in Tropical Research — though he stresses the award is more than a personal one in that it recognises the efforts of colleagues and collaborators. “Science has really become a multi-skilled effort and collaboration is the key,” he says.

Cowman’s colleagues and collaborators share this vision. Mathematics and statistics expert Professor Terry Speed (pictured far left), who is also based at WEHI, helps biomedical researchers find the genetic equivalent of the needle in the haystack of data made available by mapping the human genome. Previously, scientists investigating the genetic changes associated with diseases such as cancer only had a handful of genes to look at.

Now they have more than 20,000 to explore.

“My job is to develop new methods where they are needed and to collaborate with scientists to help them use these methods effectively,” says Speed.

Speed’s work has also been recognised publicly, with his techniques — which are used around the world — earning him awards, the most recent being Australia’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2013.

Nevertheless, Speed insists his greatest pleasure comes from teaching, mentoring students, and working with colleagues — and helping researchers single out the important details from their data. “I like to see order emerge out of chaos,” he says.

— Jude Dineley

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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Tina Smigielski

“Science has really become a multi-skilled effort and collaboration is the key.”

Profile Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark

Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research

The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research plays an important role in major data collection projects in Australia — similar to the University of Essex in the UK and the University of Michigan in the USA — collecting the ‘household panel’ information (the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, or HILDA, Survey).

In December 2013, Cobb-Clark and other researchers at the Institute were selected to be part of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, which will bring major funding to the Institute for seven years. melbourneinstitute.com

Tina Smigielski

A self-described “output person”, Deborah Cobb-Clark is undeniably prolific, with more than 100 research papers to her name.

Brought up in Michigan, USA, the Ronald Henderson Professor’s two-year stint at the US Labor Department early in her career helped her find her passion for public policy, but she was frustrated by hierarchy and procedures.

“I’m far too direct,” the 52-year-old explains. “I was much better suited to an academic environment where I could more or less say what I thought.”

Having extensively researched immigration at Illinois State University, she became an “accidental migrant” herself, “packing up the husband and the four children” to go on an 18-month adventure as a research fellow at the Australian National University. There she set up SPEAR — the Social Policy Evaluation and Research Centre — which played a pivotal role in analysing longitudinal payment data from the Australian welfare system, enabling people’s lifetime trajectory to be seen for the first time.

“There was a view that people came onto a welfare program temporarily because something bad had happened to them. But in fact a lot of people were moving from one program to another.”

Now head of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, Cobb-Clark is bringing economic approaches to some unusual areas — such as diet and exercise — endeavouring to understand why some people make better decisions for themselves than others.

“It is understanding human behaviour that really interests me,” she says, “and you have to take the policy context into account.”

— Clare Pain

News

fuelled by population growth, the number of smokers continues to climb globally, despite decreases in proportions of smokers, a comprehensive study has shown.

In 1980, 721 million people smoked tobacco daily. This figure rose to 967 million in 2012, despite proportions dropping from 41% to 31% among men and 11% to 6% among women over the same period.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Washington in Seattle collaborated on the study, published in January 2014 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Not only is smoking a major cause of health loss worldwide, killing six million people every year, but we aren’t doing as well as we thought we were doing in reducing smoking,” says Melbourne Laureate Professor Alan Lopez. “We just cannot take our eye off the ball.”

Intelligent technology helps manage natural disasters When Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in November 2013, it killed more than 6200 people and rebuild costs were estimated at US$5.8 billion. As populations grow and urbanise, and the climate warms, the impact of natural disasters is set to rise.

“We need to create a richer and a smarter platform to support timely, effective decision making for disaster management,” says Professor Abbas Rajabifard, Academic Leader and Director of the Australia Disaster Management Platform.

The University of Melbourne and IBM have built a system to communicate large volumes of information — such as geospatial data, weather observations and traffic patterns — and disseminate it to the general public and disaster management communities.

The ambitious use of intelligent technology aims to quickly dispense information that can minimise damage and loss of life before, during and after a disaster. It’s also predictive: pilot studies have shown that the system can, using observations from previous disasters, identify locations most at risk. This ‘system of systems’ is unique in that it will also allow other disaster management platforms worldwide to “plug in” their models, says Rajabifard.

“Our aim is to go beyond the Australian context,” he says.

To establish this system, train disaster management professionals, and continue research in the field, the University of Melbourne plans to open a Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety later in 2014.

— Jude Dineley Australia Disaster Management Platform: admp.org.au

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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Alamy; 123RF

Kicking a global habit

Lopez, who worked at the World Health Organisation for 22 years, guided analysis strategies and reviews of the large volumes of data.

“It’s the first really rigorous, comprehensive, detailed study of its kind,” says Lopez.

Percentages of smokers dropped more sharply earlier in the study than in later years. The researchers have been unable to explain the trend, which is of particular concern for countries such as China, where 60% of men still smoke.

Professor Rob Moodie, a University of Melbourne public health specialist, says the study confirms smoking as the largest preventable cause of premature death. “It shows we need to do a lot more to reduce smoking prevalence.”

Moodie highlights Australia’s approach to tobacco control as an example of best practise — including plain packaging laws, enacted in a world first in December 2012.

It has resulted in some of the lowest smoking statistics in the world: six out of 10 Australians have never smoked.

— Jude Dineley JAMA’s 50 years of tobacco control: bit.ly/1dc2RJp

Feature

Deciphering epilepsy

From predicting seizures to pinpointing genes, researchers are making huge leaps in understanding the causes and processes involved in epilepsy.

W

HEN INGRID SCHEFFER arrived at the University of Melbourne in 1991, she was an enthusiastic young neurologist trained at the best children’s hospital in London who knew nothing about the genetics of epilepsy. Her ignorance was understandable. Back then, nobody could claim to know anything substantive about the genetic underpinnings of a condition the ancient Greeks called the ‘sacred disease’.

For thousands of years, the seizures that characterise epilepsy were thought to be signs of spiritual possession. Today, these neurological disorders are known to be the result of abnormal electrical activity in the brain — sometimes the condition occurs after brain injury, but often the causes involve one or more genes.

Yet the widespread view in the early 1990s was that genes weren’t particularly important. So entrenched was this position that a senior colleague laughed when Scheffer said she was moving to Australia to study the genetics of the disease.

In Melbourne, Scheffer and her mentor and PhD supervisor, Professor Sam Berkovic, set about lifting the veil of ignorance. Four years after Scheffer’s arrival, they and collaborators at the University of Adelaide and the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Adelaide, identified the first gene associated with epilepsy. Since that breakthrough, this team has been responsible for finding more than half of the roughly 50 epilepsy genes identified so far.

Scheffer, now a professor at the University of Melbourne and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, is a world leader in the treatment and research of childhood epilepsies. She was named the Asia-Pacific L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Laureate in 2012, and in 2013 earned the GSKA Award for Research Excellence.

“It’s been a very exciting journey,” says Scheffer. “We’re very fortunate to have a big, multidisciplinary team that includes physiologists, molecular geneticists, imaging scientists and clinicians.”

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

Professor Ingrid Scheffer (above left) is a world leader in the treatment and research of childhood epilepsies.

Tractography (right) is a novel application of MRI that traces the brain’s circuitry by tracking the motion of water molecules in the brain, and is one of the ways researchers are getting a more detailed picture of epilepsy in the brain.

J-Donald Tournier/Fernando Calamante/Alan Connelly/The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne

Mark Cook

This X-ray image from Professor Mark Cook shows the locations of electrodes on the surface of the brain.

Numbers indicate particular electrode contacts from which seizure data is extracted.

Feature Around 60 million people worldwide have epilepsy. While most respond well to treatment, about one in three have seizures that can strike at any time, and cannot be controlled by existing treatments.

Among the more devastating forms of the disease are a group of severe conditions known as epileptic encephalopathies, which have become a particular interest for Scheffer.

Children who suffer from these epilepsies have frequent, hard-to-manage seizures at a young age, slowing normal development of the brain and resulting in intellectual impairment.

“It’s a real tragedy,” acknowledges Berkovic.

“There’s also a tragedy of not knowing, because parents really want to know why this has happened to their child.”

In 2013, Scheffer and researchers from the University of Melbourne, the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and the University of California, San Francisco, unearthed a surprise finding that provided part of the answer for some families.

The study, jointly led by Berkovic, is part of Epi4K, a $25 million worldwide project funded by the National Institutes of Health, which uses the latest techniques to sequence and analyse DNA from 4000 epilepsy patients and their relatives. Using a gene sequencing technology known as exome sequencing, they compared the genetic sequences of 264 children who had epileptic encephalopathies with those of their parents, who did not have epilepsy.

They found that in a substantial number of children, new genetic variants that were not present in their parents — called de novo mutations — seemed to cause the disease. In addition to mutations in several genes already associated with epilepsy, they found a large number of mutations in genes not previously linked with the disease.

Although the study provides a wealth of new information for the epilepsy research community, for Scheffer it all comes back to the families. “Solving the cause of these children’s epilepsy is a huge step forward in understanding why they are sick, and for developing targeted therapies.”

UNTIL RECENTLY, MANY genes found to be associated with epilepsy were only relevant for small numbers of patients with particular syndromes. But in March 2013, researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of South Australia published a paper in the journal Nature Genetics that bucked that trend.

The scientists reported that they had found mutations in a gene called DEPDC5 in an Australian family affected by a kind of mild epilepsy called familial focal epilepsy with variable foci (FFEVF).

After finding the gene in this family, Scheffer’s team started hunting for DEPDC5 mutations in eight, then 82, families with only a couple of affected people — too few for a conventional diagnosis of FFEVF.

They found the mutations in seven of the eight families originally studied, and there were “quite a few hits” among the larger group. “Suddenly you realise that it’s going to be relevant to a lot more people. Many people with focal epilepsy may have this gene, so that was pretty exciting to understand because focal epilepsy accounts for 60% of all epilepsy cases,” Scheffer explains.

WHILE THIS RESEARCH is unveiling the causes of many epilepsies, in his desk at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, University of Melbourne neurologist Professor Mark Cook keeps a collection of devices that may change how epilepsy is managed. He has a pair of long, plastic-coated electrodes, a black plastic rectangle resembling a chunky 1980s pager, and a small brushed-metal box — nothing much to look at, but revolutionary in practice.

Melbourne professor, Terry O’Brien, had begun the world’s first human study of the device, implanting it in 15 patients whose seizures had not been controlled with existing treatments.

Almost immediately, the results provided surprising insights. The researchers expected that implanting the electrodes would trigger some ‘turbulence’ in brain activity that would be evident for a few hours. But weeks went by, and the disrupted signal did not settle down.

“We had to grit our teeth and soldier on, or abandon the study altogether,” Cook recalls.

“We decided to go ahead.”

It was a good call. After 60 days, real data started to emerge. “That was an exceptional moment. It was unforgettable,” says Cook.

For the first time, researchers had gathered large amounts of data over significant periods about what goes on in the brains of people with epilepsy as they carry out their normal lives.

“ Solving the cause of these children’s epilepsy is a huge step forward in understanding why they are sick, and for developing targeted therapies.”

Combined, they have allowed Cook and his colleagues to take a step toward a holy grail of epilepsy medicine — the ability to predict when a person’s next seizure might occur.

“The misery of epilepsy is the unpredictable nature of seizures,” says Cook. “You’re always at risk. If your epilepsy is active, you can’t drive. If you’re a kid, your mum might not let you have a sleepover with your buddy. It has a 24/7, pervasive effect on people’s lives.”

For this reason, Cook, who is Chair of Medicine at the University of Melbourne and Director of Neurology at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, has long been interested in trying to predict when an individual is at risk of a seizure. “A ‘weather report’ impression of someone’s likelihood of having a seizure in the hours ahead can have significant implications for people’s day-to-day lives,” he says.

In 2009, Cook and his Melbourne colleagues began collaborating with NeuroVista, a US-based company that had developed a device that could be implanted between the patient’s skull and brain to detect brain signals. The Melbourne researchers and the company then developed a second device, implanted under the chest, which transmitted signals recorded in the brain to an external handheld device.

This handheld device has lights that warn the patient of the likelihood of a seizure.

The vital part of the system is a sophisticated computer algorithm that learns from data on brain activity patterns which precede a seizure in order to make accurate predictions.

Within months, Cook and his colleagues, including Berkovic and another University of

For the first month of the trial, the system purely recorded data to allow Cook and his team to construct the individual algorithms of seizure prediction for each patient. As the weeks passed, it became clear that the algorithms were effective for most patients.

For two patients, every seizure during the trial period of four months was predicted with a red ‘high advisory’ light. For almost all the others, more than 90% of their seizures were also predicted with red light, while a significant number of events also occurred when the white ‘moderate advisory’ light was on. Two patients had events when the indicator light was blue, which was supposed to indicate low risk — but this happened when they had stopped taking their usual medications.

The team kept fine-tuning the algorithms, and as the devices gathered more data they uncovered short- and long-term patterns that had not been seen before. The researchers began to recognise short-term precursors and ramifications of seizures, like the foreshocks and aftershocks of earthquakes. Then they identified deep rhythms that seemed to connect the effect of one seizure to later episodes.

Cook and his colleagues are now developing a less invasive form of the device that doesn’t require electrodes under the skull, and plan to trial the technology on human subjects.

“Seizures create echoes that reverberate throughout the brain’s network of neurons. If you know more about how those reverberations develop, you can predict the seizures,” Cook sums up. “That’s very new and exciting stuff.”

— Stephen Pincock

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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News

Genetic marker predicts severity of new flu

revealed that 57% of the Caucasian population would be able to mount a strong T cell response to H7N9 infection. By contrast, only 16% of Australian and North American indigenous people are likely to produce such reactions.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in December 2013, the study involved A highly virulent strain of influenza virus that emerged researchers from the US, the UK and Singapore and in China last year now threatens to cause serious illness and The future of research four Australian academic centres: the University Opening April 2014, the University death, particularly among Australian and North American of Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute of Melbourne, Monash University, Menzies School indigenous peoples. for Infection and Immunity will be home of Health Research and Griffith University.

More than 200 cases of H7N9 have been reported to over 700 scientists, researchers and staff.

Associate Professor Katherine Kedzierska — with a mortality rate between 25% and 30% — since World-renowned HIV/AIDS researcher Professor Sharon Lewin will head the institute, with a focus at the University of Melbourne’s Peter the strain was discovered in February 2013. on tackling big questions in basic research, Doherty Institute says the team found University of Melbourne researchers have found developing new vaccines and participating in that immunological responses to the H7N9 virus global surveillance programs monitoring infectious a significant level of pre-existing immunity to the new flu strain in populations disease threats. Named after the Australian Nobel show striking variation across ethnic groups. This Laureate, and situated within the prestigious previously exposed to other influenza discovery could be crucial in guiding early intervention Parkville Precinct, the institute is a strains. Indigenous Australians and Alaskans, and treatment should a H7N9 pandemic emerge. partnership between the University of however, generally lacked a vital protein Tests of the responsiveness of virus-killing Melbourne and Melbourne Health and will house seven needed to mount an immunological response.

T cells, a key component of our immune systems, organisations under “Immunity provided by T cells depends on one roof. a complex of proteins known as human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system and we know there is a different distribution of HLAs across different ethnicities,” she says.

“Indigenous populations were isolated from viruses like influenza, whereas Europeans have been exposed to influenza viruses for centuries and have evolved coexisting with the viruses to have protective mechanisms.”

Another of the paper’s authors, Nobel Prize-winning Associate Professor Katherine Kedzierska immunologist Peter Doherty, says the next steps will involve investigating other indigenous groups and isolated populations.

The $207 million institute bearing Doherty’s name is a partnership between the University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health and officially opens in mid-2014. It is one

of five global influenza centres tackling the disease.

Doherty suggests a similar vulnerability may occur in populations in the Asia Pacific region.

Hence, the researchers are now preparing to investigate New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

As a result of the findings, H7N9 pandemic management strategies may include early administration of oral antiviral drugs and development of tailored vaccines for high-risk groups.

“We’d like to find

a way to generate protective immunity in indigenous populations and make T cells work

to protect against unpredicted influenza strains,” Kedzierska says.

— Brad McLean Peter Doherty Institute: doherty.unimelb.edu.au

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

Alamy

“Indigenous populations were isolated from the flu, whereas Europeans have been exposed for centuries.”

Profile

Professor Lloyd Hollenberg

In THE strange WORLD of quantum mechanics, the laws of classical physics no longer apply. Professor Lloyd Hollenberg has devoted his career to exploring the behaviour of matter at this atomic scale.

The theoretician was part of an international team of researchers — from the University of New South Wales, Purdue University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney — who created the world’s first single-atom transistor in 2012, a leap forward in the push for faster and more secure computing.

Hollenberg and his colleagues have built on this research to develop a ‘quantum sensor’ — a device that could more deeply probe the atomic and molecular make-up of biological systems. The tiny sensor, a diamond many times smaller than the width of a human hair, contains an atomic pairing sensitive to the magnetic fields of nearby individual electrons and atoms.

While such levels of sensitivity can be achieved with existing devices, the quantum sensor is the first that is small enough to fit inside a single cell. “That’s what is really special, a combination of its sensitivity and its size,” says Hollenberg, who adds that the probe could eventually detect the presence of individual molecules and the firing of individual brain cells. Its range of potential applications is more likely to be in laboratory-based research than in patients in hospitals, and could include pinpointing the precise location of drug delivery at the cellular scale.

In this fast-moving field, Hollenberg led an interdisciplinary group of physicists, engineers and biologists who were the first to place a nanodiamond probe in a living cell. This earned them one of Australia’s top science awards, a Eureka Prize, in 2013.

“On a scientific level, it’s been tremendously rewarding for me as I get to work with a whole range of people and disciplines,” says Hollenberg. “We are harnessing the strange properties of quantum mechanics to power new sensing and computing technologies.” — Jude Dineley

Namus aut andit il enit, officiur?

Qui nobit as quost, sit que

Pic credit in here

Tina Smigielski

Deputy Director of the Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology

News

Top teachers take education further

Professor John Hattie’s review focuses on the influence of teaching rather than the conditions of learning.

Nothing beats an inspirational teacher — that’s the conclusion of a massive review of education studies, carried out by Professor John Hattie, Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute.

Hattie’s review — which covers 50,000 studies and 800 meta-analyses — is viewed as the largest collection of evidence-based research that investigates learning.

The multidisciplinary project, Visible Learning, shifts focus from learning conditions to teaching methodologies. Contrary to popular opinion, the review reveals that situational factors make little difference to student learning when compared to teaching proficiency.

This contradicts the concept that smaller class sizes, high socioeconomic status, better facilities and new technology are vital for learning.

Hattie himself has worked to improve education in Australia, and has been consulted by education ministers worldwide.

He sums up his research in three words: “Know thy impact”.

“What matters is the impact, not the teaching method,” Hattie says.

The Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE), where the institute is based, is ranked second in the world.

The 200-strong team at the MGSE is dedicated to having an attentive approach to their students’ learning, in keeping with findings from Visible Learning. Biannual subject experience surveys give valuable feedback to the faculty and reflect high student satisfaction with resources and support.

The MGSE is also collaborating with other institutions in the new Science of Learning Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, which aims to tap into neuroscience and psychology research to investigate aspects of successful learning.

“We’re setting up an experimental classroom to see what makes a difference to learning,” Hattie says.

“It’s a stunning change, and I think there is massive revolution coming in that area.” — Cherese Sonkkila Visible Learning: education.unimelb.edu.au/research

Indigenous housing by design

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Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

“ We make sure the buildings reflect the day-to-day patterns of the people living in them.”

Bower Studio sees students work with indigenous communities to create suitable living spaces.

and students arrive. This intelligent approach to design typifies O’Brien’s philosophy: “We make sure the buildings reflect the day-to-day patterns of the people living in them,” he says.

Zoe Diacolabrianos, a Master of Architecture student involved in the 2013 project, was part of a team sent to Belyuen, Northern Territory. Their project was to build a structure and design furniture to enable outdoor living for a family spanning four generations who were residing in a government-provided house.

“It was such a rare opportunity and we learned so much,” she says. “It was the highlight of my course.”

— Clare Pain Bower Studio: bowerstudio.com.au

Bower Studio

students are calling it the most “incredible experience” of their time at university — turning homes inside-out in a novel approach to indigenous housing.

Under a project known as Bower Studio, led by Dr David O’Brien of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, students visit a remote Aboriginal community and work alongside locals to build a house the students designed.

O’Brien says the federal government takes a “cookiecutter” approach to indigenous housing — Aboriginal people are accommodated in standard homes that don’t meet their needs. Indigenous Australians have a broad concept of family, and “often sleep as a family group, and the bedrooms are too small,” he explains. “And, especially in hot climates, people will spend a good portion of the year wanting to sleep outside, and residents need safe places for this.

A lot of the cooking is done outside as well.”

The team fine-tunes their design through consultation, visiting the community months before the materials

Profile

Professor Alan Pert

Tina Smigielski

Director of the Melbourne School of Design Graduating in 1992 in Glasgow, architect Professor Alan Pert, now the Director of the Melbourne School of Design, learned his trade working on the transformation of a humble tram shed into what is now the internationally-acclaimed Tramway arts venue.

The 2013 Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award is the latest in a string of accolades for Pert and colleagues at the Northern Office of Research & Design (NORD) — a company Pert founded in Glasgow in 2002 and now directs from Australia. At £25,000, the prize is the largest of its kind in the UK and was awarded for the regeneration of WASPS South Block in Glasgow — an Edwardian workshop that now hosts artists’ studios, a gallery and a coffee shop.

Pert founded NORD with an expansive vision. “We wanted to look beyond the traditional realms of architectural practice and find ways of getting involved in a myriad of other disciplines,” says Pert.

He firmly believes that architects need to look beyond the walls of the buildings they design. “You’ve got to now understand the impact that building has on a wider community, whether it’s to do with energy, infrastructure, transport or whatever else.”

His outlook resonates with the interdisciplinary set-up at the Melbourne School of Design, which houses six disciplines, including construction and urban planning.

Health and affordable housing are two major research themes at the school, in preparation for our growing, and ageing, population. “It’s something the University has got a big part to play in,” he says. — Jude Dineley

Under the radar Bowel cancer is Australia’s second biggest cancer killer, yet its threat is under-communicated and screening remains a challenge. Now, new research is changing the way we think about this deadly disease.

Feature

PERHAPS SQUEAMISHNESS is partly to blame.

Whatever the cause, the consequence is that the disease receives inadequate funding, and too little effort is put into prevention, Jenkins says. This is bitterly ironic, because bowel cancer is in fact preventable — more preventable, for example, than breast cancer. What’s more, methods for detecting bowel cancers early are available and very effective, he says, and if doctors can detect signs of cancer early enough, they have a good chance of effectively treating the disease.

Ideally, people who are at higher risk should be tested or screened for a disease more often, while those at low risk are screened less intensively. This avoids wasting healthcare resources and minimises the chance of people suffering harm from the screening process itself. This is particularly true in the case of colonoscopy, which carries a small risk of damaging the bowel.

Before more effective screening programs can be put into action for bowel cancer, researchers need to know more about the lifestyle and genetic factors that increase a person’s risk, and more about how best to implement screening programs in the real world. Over recent years, Jenkins and his team at the University of Melbourne have focused their attention on world-leading research programs to address these very questions.

IT WAS EARLY IN 2010 that Dr Driss Ait-Ouakrim stumbled across the shocking data that helped set the trajectory for recent bowel cancer research at the University of Melbourne. The epidemiologist was studying Australia’s foremost resource for research into the causes of bowel cancer, the Australasian Colorectal Cancer Family Registry. The register, begun in 1997 by the University of Melbourne’s Professor John Hopper, brings together information on some 28,000 people with bowel cancer and their wider families.

For his PhD project, Ait-Ouakrim was sifting through this mountain of data to see if he could pinpoint a starting place for identifying the predictors of screening behaviour in the population, which could be used to improve screening for bowel cancer. His first goal was to look at the small fraction of people who were known to be at high risk. Accounting for 1–2% of the population, this group has a genetic burden that means they should be undergoing colonoscopies every year.

Early results from the study astounded the researchers. “The first thing I found was that only 1% of people at potentially high risk were screening according to the existing recommendations,” says Ait-Ouakrim.

Other experts had told him those at high-risk probably didn’t undergo screening as often as is currently recommended. But the idea that almost none of them were receiving appropriate screening seemed preposterous. “I had to check the data and rerun my analysis several times to believe it.”

Next, Ait-Ouakrim looked at whether people at average risk for bowel cancer were getting appropriate levels of screening. Australia already has a national screening program in place for this group, and guidelines which advise people over the

The team of scientists, epidemiologists and clinicians aim to develop a personalised risk tool for bowel cancer, and methods for general practitioners to implement the tool in their day-to-day practice. age of 50 to undergo faecal occult blood testing once every two years. Here again, the researchers found something unexpected. “About 20% of average risk people were overscreened,” says Ait-Ouakrim.

Instead of the inexpensive and safe faecal occult blood test — in which a stool sample is tested for evidence of blood — many individuals at low-risk were having costly, potentially harmful and probably unnecessary colonoscopies.

Ait-Ouakrim’s research showed that people who were at the highest risk of bowel cancer were not being screened enough, while those at average risk were being screened too much.

“For every million Australians aged over 50, around 80,000 people are being over-screened with colonoscopies and around 30,000 should be having colonoscopies but aren’t,” says Jenkins.

USING THESE RESULTS, Jenkins and his team convinced Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council to fund a $2.5 million Centre for Research Excellence to reduce bowel cancer by improving screening based on personal risk.

One potential treatment for cancer is to use the immune system’s T cells (orange) to induce cell death in cancer cells (pink).

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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Dr Andrejs Liepins/Science Photo Library

E

VERY NOW AND THEN when Professor Mark Jenkins talks about the global burden of bowel cancer, you can hear exasperation in his voice. Jenkins has spent much of his career studying the genetic and environmental causes of cancer, particularly bowel cancer.

Director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, he knows only too well that every year roughly 1.4 million people around the world develop bowel cancer.

The disease is among the most frequently diagnosed cancers worldwide, particularly in Australia, the UK, and the US. The source of Jenkins’ frustration is that, despite the prevalence of this cancer, it rarely gets public attention.

“In Australia, bowel cancer is the second biggest cancer killer and the second most frequently diagnosed cancer, but it tends not to be talked about much in the public,” he says. “It’s more common than breast cancer but you don’t hear about it. I can’t think of any movie stars who have spoken publicly about their bowel cancer.”

Feature “ For every million Australians aged over 50, around 80,000 people are being over-screened with colonoscopies, and around 30,000 should be having colonoscopies but aren’t.”

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Electron micrographs like this are used by scientists to compare surface structures of normal cells with cancer cells.

Linking genes and lifestyle DR AUNG KO WIN has made some of the University of Melbourne’s most important recent discoveries about the interaction between lifestyle and genetics in bowel cancer.

The young researcher has been studying families affected by Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that puts individuals at 50–100 times higher risk of bowel cancer than the general population. About 2–5% of bowel cancer cases are caused by Lynch syndrome. The condition is also linked to an increased risk of cancers of the liver, stomach, small intestine, gallbladder ducts, upper urinary tract, brain, skin, ovaries and uterus.

Researchers know that Lynch syndrome is associated with variations in a particular set of genes. Yet not everyone with variants in these genes has the same risk for bowel cancer, Win explains.

“I’ve been trying to find out what we can do to prevent disease in those with a genetic predisposition. Should we remove part or all of the bowel, should they be told to lose weight, should they be having a colonoscopy every year?”

Because the disease is rare, studying people with Lynch syndrome has been an enormous

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

challenge, but “it’s critical that we can identify them,” says Win. To overcome this, the Melbourne team contacted other research groups worldwide who were working on this same condition and proposed that they combine forces and contribute their data to the one single analysis.

To date, this collaborative enterprise has gathered about 150 researchers from 75 centres with data on about 8000 families affected by Lynch syndrome. The dataset is the largest in the world and will help researchers understand how cancer risks differ by a specific gene mutation, age, gender, ethnicity or geographic location, the environment and lifestyle factors involved, and how these relate to genetic data.

In 2013, Victoria’s Minister for Innovation, Services and Small Business, Louise Asher, gave Win the Premier’s Award for Health or Medical Research for his work towards developing a new model for bowel cancer risk prediction.

“The most interesting aspect for me has been discovering new facts about genetic syndromes which will prevent cancers and help save lives,” says Win.

© Phototake Inc/Alamy

The centre brings together researchers from the University of Melbourne, the new Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, Royal Melbourne Hospital, the Cancer Council Victoria, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and the University of Western Australia.

The first step in the centre’s plan is to develop a screening tool that can provide individual risk assessments for bowel cancer by combining a person’s genes, family history, age, and lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise and medication use, says Jenkins.

A vital source of genetic information will be the Colon Cancer Family Registry — a collaboration between the University of Melbourne registry and a number of US and Canadian research groups, funded by the National Institutes of Health — which allows researchers to draw on a much larger dataset.

“What we’re exploring now is ways of mining that genetic information for predictors of bowel cancer risk. In the future, when you go to a GP, that personal genetic information is going to become increasingly useful,” Jenkins explains.

Another aim of the centre is to work out ways for general practitioners to use such a risk prediction tool and to recommend screening based on this risk.

“Nearly 90% of Australians visit their GP annually,” says co-investigator Associate Professor Marie Pirotta.

“This centre provides an exciting opportunity for academic general practitioners to work closely with scientists and specialist colleagues to develop both the risk prediction tool and the best ways to integrate this tool into everyday general practice.”

To this end, the centre will draw on Professor Jon Emery’s expertise in the role of general practice in cancer care.

“Our job is to translate the more accurate bowel cancer risk assessments that Jenkins’ group is developing and apply it in general practice,” says Emery, who has recently been appointed by the University of Melbourne. “It’s one thing for a bunch of academics like us to develop a tool like this and another completely to have GPs use it in their day-to-day practice.”

Emery and his colleagues have just commenced a pilot program asking general practitioners to use a variety of screening tools in a role-play with actors, to see how they might use them in a routine setting.

Bringing the group’s research closer to the real world makes Jenkins hopeful that people will soon pay more attention to preventing bowel cancer.

“A generation ago, prostate cancer wasn’t even mentioned — now it’s widely talked about,” he says. “Bowel cancer affects everybody and there’s no question at all about screening effectiveness if you can find the people you should be targeting.” — Stephen Pincock

Profile

Professor Doug Hilton

It was a summer work experience job as an undergraduate that set Doug Hilton on the path to a career in research. He subsequently enrolled as a PhD student at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI), where he made the significant discovery of a protein called leukaemia inhibitory factor.

Today, the protein is used in labs the world over in the creation of genetically-engineered mice that help researchers understand the role genes play in diseases such as cancer and arthritis.

Now in his forties, Professor Hilton is head of WEHI’s Molecular Medicine division and, since 2009, has been the Institute’s Director. He’s also the head of the Department of Medical Biology at the University of Melbourne.

In these roles, Hilton enjoys working with some of the world’s brightest young minds.

“They come here as students and postdocs, have their own ideas and are passionate, articulate, argumentative and a pleasure to work with,” he says.

The recipient of a succession of awards and honours — including a fellowship of the Australian Academy of Sciences at the age of 39, and in 2013, the Ramaciotti Medal for Excellence in Biomedical Research — one of Hilton’s goals as Director is to help young researchers at WEHI achieve the same level of success as he has. For Hilton, the erosion of scientists’ time with grant writing and administration are obstacles to this.

“I really do believe you need that unstructured time to be able to be at your most creative,” he explains.

Under Hilton’s leadership, WEHI is looking to improve the situation by boosting grants with philanthropic funding and operating smaller labs with smaller budgets. “I won’t pretend that we have solved the issue, but I would raise that as one of our big challenges for the next three years.”

— Jude Dineley

Tina Smigielski

Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

THE BIGGER THE TREE, the more it grows, a new global study reveals, challenging conventional ideas.

The enormous study of 673,046 trees includes data collected by Associate Professor Patrick Baker of the Melbourne School of Land and Environment.

“There’s no dataset in the world that comes within orders of magnitude of this,” says Baker, a co-author of the study led by the US Geological Survey and published in Nature, January 2014.

For nearly 20 years, Baker and his colleagues have monitored about 80,000 trees on 50 hectares of forest in Thailand’s Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary.

Trees use energy from sunlight to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and turn it into glucose for their energy needs. The excess is used for new leaves and roots, thickening trunks and branches, or growing taller.

The ability of foliage to absorb CO2 is important for reducing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. But until now, no one has known how the size of a tree affects how much carbon it can store each year.

The study tested two opposing ideas. “Conventional wisdom is a sort of animal-model approach,” Baker says.

The idea is that trees grow fast when they are young, reach a plateau, and finally growth declines.

The Nature study, in contrast, validates an idea arising from metabolic scaling theory — an application of mathematics to biology that “took the biological sciences by storm” in the late ’90s, says Baker. This predicts that the bigger a tree gets, the more it grows.

The study covered 403 tree species across six continents. For 97% of species, bigger trees put on more kilograms each year than smaller ones.

Are forests of bigger trees better for reducing atmospheric CO2? “It’s more complicated than that,” Baker warns. It’s possible that many smaller trees could result in more carbon uptake overall than a few big trees. — Clare Pain Nature paper: bit.ly/1cuMHKE

ISTOCKPHOTO

Bigger trees best at putting on weight

News

Powerful resource develops children’s resilience

“It is increasingly important that children are taught how to cope with everyday stresses, such as saying goodbye to a parent.”

Expressing their feelings through discussion, movement and drawing can help children learn coping skills.

where depression and other mental health issues are being experienced in epidemic proportions.”

Deans says the guide has proved very powerful and is having a great impact on children, parents and teachers. “This is of major importance, as social emotional competence is a prerequisite for effective learning and success throughout the schooling years and indeed life,” she says.

To manage regularly occurring situations, such as crying, hitting, hiding and throwing tantrums, teachers and parents need to have the tools to help children achieve positive social and emotional outcomes, adds Deans.

Developing Everyday Coping Skills in the Early Years focuses on thinking and feeling skills and responds to the National Early Years Learning

Framework, in which children’s health and wellbeing is identified as one of the five learning outcomes.

Teaching young children how to cope and be resilient develops their awareness of self and others.

The authors’ suggestions for helping children learn coping skills include: • Asking children to draw a difficult situation, like being left out of a group of friends, and then discuss their feelings either individually or in groups.

• Using dance and music for children to interpret their feelings and ideas, by matching body movements to coping images. Children can act out their thoughts and feelings and be helped to dramatise how they would like to deal successfully with a situation that is challenging to them.

Frydenberg says children are spending long times in organised care, so early childhood teachers have a particularly important role to play in teaching young children coping skills.

“Developing a positive orientation, where the child is able to focus on coping rather than on distress, can help children develop skills they can take with them throughout their lives.”

Developing Everyday Coping Skills in the Early Years handbook: bit.ly/OW42bn

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

123RF

Children should be taught coping skills the same way they are taught to hold a pen or ride a bike, according to experts from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Director of the University’s Early Learning Centre Janice Deans and educational psychologist Associate Professor Erica Frydenberg have released a ‘how to’ guide to teaching coping skills to young children.

Developing Everyday Coping Skills in the Early Years draws on over 20 years of research in coping by Frydenberg and colleagues, to offer practical hints and tips for early childhood teachers and parents of young children.

Frydenberg says there is a growing need to teach children how to cope with everyday stresses, such as saying goodbye to a parent, being scared of the dark, or feeling left out of a group of friends.

“Learning coping skills at a young age means children can be equipped for optimal growth and development,” says Frydenberg. “This is increasingly important in Western communities,

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Profile

Professor TIM LINDSEY

Tina Smigielski

Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law Australia must engage better with its Southeast Asian neighbours if it is to avoid being a “bit player” in the Asian century, says Professor Tim Lindsey, Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law and Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the Melbourne Law School.

Relations with Indonesia are particularly important. Predicted to be a top-five global economy by 2050, Indonesia aspires to be the dominant power in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“It wants to be to ASEAN as Germany is to the EU, and it will probably achieve that within the next 20 to 30 years,” says Lindsey.

Lindsey’s research includes collaborations with the Supreme and religious courts in Indonesia and the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. It focuses on the interaction between law, politics, policy making and governance and the role of Islam.

A fluent Bahasa Indonesia speaker, his work takes him to the country frequently.

On-the-ground engagement with people working in the institutions is crucial, he says.

Recent friction over Australia’s handling of asylum seekers travelling from Indonesia, has soured relations to a 15-year low, he says.

“We need to build new links and we haven’t been doing that in any meaningful way.”

Australia needs to prioritise engagement with Indonesia at a governmental level, and increase teaching of Asian studies and language courses in schools and universities, Lindsey adds. Polls reveal that many Australians perceive Indonesia as a hostile, threatening nation — and this indirectly affects Australia’s foreign policy. Improved education could address this issue.

Lindsey, who chairs the Australian Government’s Australia–Indonesia Institute, argues that as two genuine multi-party liberal democracies in the region, and with a shared laid-back mentality, the countries are natural allies. “We’ve really got to try harder to improve understanding between our two countries.” — Jude Dineley

Young guns

The next big thing Tina Smigielski

Younger researchers at the University of Melbourne may have big shoes to fill, but they are making rapid progress toward the top of their game.

The University of Melbourne’s excellent reputation in science, as well as its opportunities in research, attracts many young career researchers.

Dr Francesca Minerva (pictured above left) holds a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship, established to attract outstanding doctoral graduates from outside the University in areas of research priority. The cross-disciplinary focus of the Fellowship made it an “obvious choice” given her specialisation in bioethics.

Minerva researches controversial choices in medicine.

One paper in particular, asking whether there is an ethical difference between aborting a fetus and euthanasing a newborn, triggered what she calls a “violent media storm” — during which she received plenty of support from her colleagues and the University. Through the Fellowship, she has learned from many inspiring people, she says. “This has been a great opportunity to grow professionally, and to become a better person.”

Minerva is excited about her new research — which looks at aesthetic enhancement and discrimination against unattractive people — and working on her main interest, the conflict between patients’ and doctors’ values. “I love what I do and I hope to keep publishing papers that force people to think about issues that are important.”

At the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Dr Phong Tran, who also holds a McKenzie Fellowship, is researching new materials for soft tissue damage repair that can better integrate with the body

than the options currently available. He hopes the end result reduces the cost of surgery for repairing soft tissue damage caused by disease or traumatic events.

Sally Sherwen (pictured above right), recent winner of the University’s Three Minute Thesis competition, says she’s keen to continue the research kick-started by her University of Melbourne undergraduate degree for her doctoral project on animal welfare.

“ This has been a great opportunity to grow professionally, and to become a better person.”

Her PhD thesis explores the effect visitors have on zoo animals, an area she believes will be of increasing importance as zoos reinvent themselves as conservation organisations. She works as an animal welfare specialist with a range of species at Zoos Victoria, from penguins to capuchin monkeys, using novel techniques to determine how animals are affected by their conditions, including analysing faeces to measure stress hormone levels.

She is fascinated by the quirky traits animals have, such as the huge repertoire of visual gestures and facial expressions used by capuchins to communicate. “It was interesting to learn what they signalled — like learning another language,” she says. — Laura Boness Three Minute Thesis: gradresearch.unimelb.edu.au/3MT

Research and Innovation at the University of Melbourne

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