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Media Release

September 9 2009

Top UniSA women named Future Fellows

Three UniSA women win Futrure Fellowships Three top female researchers at UniSA have been awarded prestigious Future Fellowships today in the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’s announcements of 200 outstanding national and international mid-career researchers.

Senator Kim Carr announced the first of the new Australian Research Council Fellowships in Canberra today.

The new scheme is targeted at retaining and attracting Australia’s brightest and best researchers to contribute to a national priorities innovation agenda.

UniSA’s Associate Professor Libby Roughead (Division of Health Sciences), Associate Professor Jill Slay ( Division of IT, Engineering and the Environment) and Dr Catherine Whitby (Ian Wark Research Institute) have won research funding totalling almost $2.2 million over the next four years for research projects in key areas including nanotechnology, the use of medicines and forensic computing for essential infrastructure services.

UniSA Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation, Professor Caroline McMillen says she is delighted with UniSA’s early success in this competitive grants field.

“As a dynamic, young, research institution it is exciting to see that our focus on attracting and nurturing outstanding researchers at UniSA has been successful,” Prof McMillen said. “We are extremely proud of the achievements of our three Fellows and of this important national recognition of their work.

“They are each dedicated and outcomes-focussed researchers, working in fields for which they have a real passion and their work is of national and international significance.”

Prof Roughhead will examine international experience in decision making within pharmaceutical reimbursement systems. She will lead an analysis of international policies guiding decision making and interviews with key leaders in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia.

She will also assess the suitability of using administrative health data sets to gather evidence for the Australian health system.

Working in process control and monitoring systems for large essential utilities, Associate Professor Jill Slay will be examining vulnerabilities due to increasing internet-connectedness through corporate IT networks.

Her work aims to develop the capability to deliver a novel system architecture that identifies, preserves, analyses, exploits and visualizes digital evidence collected from such nationally critical services as power, gas, oil, water and sewage.

In a project set to benefit established Australian minerals processing industries and emerging pharmaceutical applications which rely heavily on controlling the effects of small, solid particles in emulsions and foams, Dr Whitby will apply advanced microfluidic techniques to provide a new platform for studying how particles can be used to manipulate the interactions between drops and bubbles.

Through international collaborations, she hopes to deliver significant new fundamental understandings of the behaviour of particles at drop and bubble surfaces.

The results of this project will enhance the development of new and improved nanotechnologies for increasing the international competitiveness of Australian industries.



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