Highlights

Professor George Muscat is currently a Professorial and an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow (2014-18) at IMB, and an affiliate appointment in the Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland.

Professor Muscat completed undergraduate training at the University of Sydney, and was mentored by Professor Peter B. Rowe during the completion of his PhD program at the CMRI (1981-85).

He conducted his Postdoctoral Research under the guidance of Professor Larry Kedes at Stanford University, CA. (1985-88), and was subsequently appointed as an Assistant Professor of Research at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1989).

He joined The University of Queensland in 1990, and focused his research on understanding the molecular role of Nuclear Hormone Receptor signalling in breast cancer, diabetes, obesity and exercise.

Professor Muscat was a visiting scientist/sabbatical visitor at X-Ceptor Therapeutics, San Diego (2001), involved in a scientific collaboration with Metabolex, and a Guest Professor, Sahlgrenska Academy, The University of Gothenburg, (2014-15). 

He has served as a member of: (i) the editorial boards of J. Biol. Chem., Endocrinology and Molecular Endocrinology, (ii) NHMRC Assigners Academy, NHMRC GRPs, NHMRC Research Fellowships Peer Review Panels, and (iii) National Breast Cancer Foundation Research Advisory Council. 

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Paul Alewood graduated from the University of NSW before moving to the University of Calgary for his PhD. His early research interest was in classical organic chemistry, but the discovery in the mid 1970s of encephalins – short-chain amino acids produced in the body that have a similar effect to morphine – triggered an interest in protein and peptide chemistry.

He moved to Queensland, attracted by the state’s healthy populations of dangerous marine animals – cone snails, sea snakes and stone fish, to name a few. Such animals offer vast potential in the treatment of chronic pain, as their venom contains thousands of small peptides that target sensory nerve receptors.

He is the author of more than 300 publications and was a prime mover in establishing the Melbourne-based peptide company, Auspep, and Xenome, a spin-off biopharmaceutical company from the University of Queensland. More recently, he was a foundation scientist at Betabiotics, a joint venture company between IMB and CSIRO, and the founder of Elacor, a joint venture between the University of Queensland and the Baker Heart Research Institute, Victoria.

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Professor Koopman earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 1986 for research on stem cell differentiation. He moved to London soon afterwards for a postdoctoral appointment in the Mammalian Development Unit at the Medical Research Council, where he conducted medical analyses of mouse embryo development. During a second postdoc, with the National Institute for Medical Research, he was part of the team who isolated the mouse Y-chromosome gene (now known as SRY) and demonstrated its role in sex determination by reversing the sex of XX-chromosome mice. The discovery is widely regarded as one of the major achievements in molecular genetics of the 20th century.

In 1992 he took a role at The University of Queensland, and now heads a research team whose work focuses on genes that regulate embryonic development, with special emphasis on the molecular genetics of sex development, fertility, gonadal cancers and intersex conditions. He’s also extensively involved in research training, having co-founded the Australian Developmental Biology Workshop in 2001. The workshop is a training-ground for the next generation of developmental biologists in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

Between 2007 and 2012 he was a Federation Fellow of the ARC, and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

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Mark Ragan is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

He was founding Head of IMB's former Division of Genomics & Computational Biology (2000-2014), founding Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics (2003-2015), and co-founder of QFAB Bioinformatics.

Mark is a graduate of the University of Chicago (Biochemistry) and Dalhousie University (Biology). His 200+ peer-reviewed research publications in biochemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, genomics, algorithmics, bioinformatics and computational biology have attracted more than 13500 citations.

Core technologies in his research group (integration of large bioscience data, scalable algorithms on trees and networks, bioinformatic workflows, high-performance and data-centric computing) were applied to problems of genome sequencing and de novo assembly, comparative evolutionary genomics, and inference of biomolecular networks particularly in the coral reef symbiont Symbiodinium, and in targeting therapies against DNA damage repair networks in familial breast cancer.

Mark was also involved in national and international infrastructure initiatives in genomics, computing, data and bioinformatics services.

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