Critical Care Medicine focuses on supporting patients, often with one or multiple organ failures. Based at the largest Australian cardiac hospital, our research investigates better ways to support patients with heart and/or lung failure. We explore technological, pharmacological and engineering advances that could help our patients to live longer and better. Our group is world-renowned for clinically relevant large animal models, including heart failure, respiratory failure (ARDS), heart transplantation, sepsis, cardiogenic shock, and more. All our studies use hospital-grade equipment and follow the same clinical guideline to maximise translation. We actively take on honours, MPhil and PhD students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds (science, engineering, medicine, allied health), with a successful track record in supporting our students to secure their own grants and funding. Students are expected to contribute to other studies of the group. For more information about the group, please visit ccrg.org.au, and email if you are interested to join us.

Research interests in Artificial Heart and Lung therapies.

Charted Engineering (Biomedical) with Engineers Australia and BPEQ. Industry experience in nonclinical device testing and regulatory submissions of total artificial heart.

Engineering Lead at Innovative Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology Laboratory (ICETLab), Critical Care Research Group, The Prince Charles Hospital

Dr Hana Starobova is a pharmacist and NHMRC research fellow at the Sensory Neuropharmacology Group at the University of Queensland (UQ). She works under the mentorship of Prof. Vetter, and as an early career researcher, she is working toward an independent research career as a group leader. She obtained her PhD in 2020 from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ, and continued here to conduct studies as a Children Hospital Foundation Fellow (2021-2023) in the areas of cancer therapy-induced adverse and late effects with the main focus on neuropathies. Over the past four years, she has developed a research program focusing on the understanding of cancer therapy-induced adverse and late effects with a special interest in children, and established innovative transcriptomic and microscopy pipelines, in vitro assays, adult and juvenile models of adverse and late effects following mono- and combination chemotherapy and radiotherapy, assays for the assessment of adverse effects including cognition and neuropathies, as well as cancer models. Knowledge impact arising from her research program has been disseminated in 18 peer-reviewed publications, having together attracted >1,100 citations (h-index 15, i10-index 18, Google Scholar, May 2024).