Profiles

Professor Martin Pera is the Program Leader of Stem Cells Australia. He has over 25 years experience in human pluripotent stem cell research and has authored over 100 peer reviewed publications. Pera was among a small number of researchers who pioneered the isolation and characterisation of pluripotent stem cells from human germ cell tumours of the testis, work that provided an important framework for the development of human embryonic stem cells.

Professor Alexander is joint head of the Cancer and Haematology Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. He also heads the institute's Mouse Genomics Centre and Gene Targeting Laboratory. Professor Alexander is a full-time researcher who specialises in molecular haematology with particular interest in genomics approaches to the role of cytokines in health and disease, haematopoietic stem cells and leukaemia. He will contribute expertise in ES cell manipulation, haematopoietic stem cell assays and use and maintenance of murine models.

Associate Professor Tiziano Barberi has been engaged in stem cell research since the beginning of his scientific career. He started as a graduate student at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (the Italian Institute of Health) studying the molecular and cellular factors governing hematopoiesis. After graduation in 1998, he moved to the New York, USA at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), where he started a postdoctoral fellowship working on the directed differentiation of mouse ESC (mESC). In 2003, he published a milestone article in Nature Biotechnology, the first to describe a comprehensive method to differentiate mESC into specific neuronal subtypes in a stepwise fashion.

Professor Perry Bartlett has been at the forefront of the discovery and study of neural stem cells (NSC) in the adult brain. A series of key discoveries from Bartlett’s laboratory (PNAS 1992; Neuron 1993) lead to the co-discovery and successful isolation of NSC from the adult mice forebrain (Nature 2001). The impact of this research was highly significant and the 2001 paper, which has attracted 353 citations, was included in Nature’s list of classic papers in the entire stem cell field. More recently Bartlett has focused on elucidating the cells and regulatory factors that influence the production of new neurons (termed neurogenesis) in the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for learning and memory.

Dr James Bourne heads a group within the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute that aims to better understand the development of the visual cortex as a precursor to addressing questions of cell replacement and regeneration. More recently, he moved into the area of stem cell biology, examining the potential of the neocortex to self-repair.

Professor Capon has established a World class laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience,University of Queensland, equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, methodologies and protocols designed to optimize outcomes from biodiscovery research. This laboratory hosts biodiversity as well as natural extract and pure compound diversity libraries comprising several thousand microbial isolates as well as several thousand marine invertebrate and algal extracts, encompassing many tens of thousands of biosynthetically and structurally diverse natural products.

Professor Justin Cooper-White has expertise in biomaterials and microbioreactor development, which he utilises to understand how hESC and iPSC interact with surfaces and how microenvironmental cues influence the efficiency of maintenance, expansion and differentiation of single stem cells and stem cell colonies. Professor Cooper-White’s expertise in each of these areas will be integral to research performed in the Stem Cells Australia initiative, where he will play a key scientific role in the development of advanced technology platforms for the research programs.

Dr Mirella Dottori is currently Group Leader of the Stem Cell Laboratory within the Centre for Neuroscience at University of Melbourne. Her PhD (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute) and postdoctoral studies (Salk Institute, USA) were on understanding early neural specification and patterning within the nervous system. Dr Dottori returned to Australia as a NHMRC Howard Florey Fellow where she joined Professor Martin Pera’s group at Monash University working on human embryonic stem cells. In 2007, together with Dr Pebay, Dr Dottori established Stem Cell Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Andrew Elefanty will contribute his expertise in the directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells to the Stem Cells Australia initiative. His input into the program will be to utilise his established expertise in hESC biology, culture, expansion, differentiation and genetic manipulation, as well as extensive experience in hematology and developmental biology.

Dr David Elliott’s research exploits the potential of hESC derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CMs) to address major issues in human cardiac biology. He has generated genetically modified hESC lines in which the green fluorescent protein (GFP) expression marks developing cardiomyocytes. Using these lines, he has developed reproducible protocols for the production and isolation of hESC derived cardiomyocytes and cardiac progenitor cells, in chemically defined media.

Professor David Gardner is a world-renowned embryologist with a background of success in improving blastocyst viability through understanding embryo physiology and the interaction of the embryo with the culture environment. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in reproductive biology / reproductive medicine. Over the past 25 years, Gardner has pioneered novel technologies in cell and embryo culture and analysis, specifically developing an understanding of nutrient utilisation by individual embryos, and small numbers of stem cells, and the impact of this on embryo potential.

Professor Graham received his medical training at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and subspecialty training (Cardiorenal diseases) at St. Vincent’s and Sydney Hospitals before moving to the US in 1977. There he worked at Southwestern Medical School, Dallas (postdoctoral fellow and then Assistant Professor), the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School (Associate Professor in Medicine and Head, Cardiac Biochemistry Laboratory), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Visiting Professor, Laboratory of HG Khorana) and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (Robert C. Tarazi Professor and Chairman, Department of Molecular Cardiology) and Case Western Reserve University (Professor of Physiology and Biophysics).

Professor Peter Gray is the Director and a Group Leader in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland. He has extensive experience in bioprocess development for mammalian cell cultures, and is applying this experience to the development of conditions and strategies which will allow the scaleable expansion of pluripotent stem cells under fully defined conditions.

Professor Sean Grimmond’s research over the last decade has focused on the surveying of genome, transcriptome and epigenome content and dynamics in biological systems and the integration of these data to define the molecular events controlling biological processes and pathological states. These approaches have been used to study stem cells (mouse and human ESC and human iPSC), embryological development (urogenital organogenesis and hematopoiesis) and cancer (pancreatic, ovarian and breast) and provided novel insights into the complexity of the stem cell extracellular space, the prevalence of non-coding RNAs expressed in stem cells and refined models of stem cell signaling and pluripotency gene networks.

Professor Richard Harvey’s research focuses on the genetic basis of heart development and congenital heart disease, on the biology and origin of adult cardiac stem cells, and cardiac regeneration. He received his PhD in 1982 from the University of Adelaide, training in molecular biology. He undertook postdoctoral studies in embryology at Harvard University, then moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, establishing an independent group. In 1998, he relocated to the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, where he is currently Co-Deputy Director and Head of the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Division. He holds the endowed Sir Peter Finley Professorship of Heart Research at UNSW and an NHMRC Australia Fellowship. He is a member of EMBO and the Australian Academy of Science.

Associate Professor David Haylock brings considerable expertise in the isolation, characterization and ex vivo manipulation of human haemopoietic stem and progenitor cells to this initiative. Specifically, Associate Professor Haylock has developed serum-free cytokine dependent culture systems for ex vivo expansion of haemopoietic stem cells (HSC) that enable analysis of the effect of purified recombinant cytokines on the proliferation and differentiation of HSC. Furthermore, he has significant skills in flow cytometric methods for multiparameter immunophenotypic analysis and fluorescent activated sorting of rare cell subsets.

Professor Hilton is an expert in the field of molecular and cellular haematology, focusing on blood cell production and cytokine signal transduction. His significant contributions are attested by publications in the highest impact journals including Cell, Nature, Nature Immunology, EMBO Journal and PNAS, detailing his discovery and characterization of leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF), cytokine receptors and the Suppressor of Cytokine Signalling (SOCS) proteins. These basic research outcomes have been and are still actively being commercialised through long-term collaboration with the private sector.

Professor Trevor Kilpatrick of the University of Melbourne is an internationally recognized neuroscience researcher. Over the last 20 years, he has been seminally involved, together with Professor Perry Bartlett, in a number of significant paradigm shifts in neuroscience research, in particular as it pertains to neural stem cell research. Professors Kilpatrick and Bartlett were the first to conclusively demonstrate that stem cells exist in the embryonic forebrain (Kilpatrick & Bartlett, Neuron 10: 255) and that neurogenesis occurs within the adult mammalian central nervous system (PNAS 89: 8591).

Dr Andrew Laslett brings a well established expertise in the detailed characterisation of pluripotent stem cells to the Stem Cells Australia initiative. His research group has developed a FACS-based immunotranscriptional profiling system for identifying and isolating hESC that express high levels of the cell surface antigens CD9 and GCTM-2 and they have demonstrated that these cells represent a highly enriched population of hESC.

Professor Melissa Little has a long history in the field of kidney developmental biology, having associated mutations in the WT1 gene with Denys Drash syndrome and sporadic Wilms’ tumour, and is a pioneer in the field of renal stem cell biology and renal regeneration. She has published over 70 international journal articles including publications in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Cell Stem Cell and Cell Developmental Cell.

Professor Michael Monteiro (ARC Future Fellow) gained international recognition in the field of nanostructured materials. His research contributions to the synthesis, characterization and molecular engineering of polymer nanoparticles are wide-ranging and of high impact. His publications are evidence of his standing in the international community.

Dr Trent Munro obtained his PhD in Protein Biochemistry from the University of Queensland in 2001. He then went on to do postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and at the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge. Dr Munro returned to Australia in 2006 to take a position at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland with Prof Peter Gray.

Dr Megan Munsie brings an unique set of skills to her role as an Associate Researcher and head of the Education, Ethics, Law & Community Awareness of Stem Cell Science Unit. Prior to joining the stem cell field, Dr Munsie worked for over ten years as a clinical embryologist in IVF practices around Australia. Subsequently, Dr Munsie was the first person to demonstrate - in an animal model - that pluripotent stem cells could be generated from an adult cell using the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

Professor Lars Nielsen is Chair of Biological Engineering and Group Leader for Systems & Synthetic Biology in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology. He has worked in cell culture engineering since 1988, and specifically haematopoietic stem cell culture engineering since 1995. His expertise is in scaling up haematopoietic processes for clinical application and the development of mathematical models of fate decisions in ex vivo and in vivo haematopoiesis.

Associate Professor Susie Nilsson brings a unique repertoire of skills and knowledge to the Stem Cells Australia initiative in the area of in vivo murine models of haemopoiesis, haemopoietic stem cell (HSC) biology and the haemopoietic stem cell niche. Associate Professor Nilsson has established a series of innovative approaches to investigate functional properties of HSC, particularly those related to their ability to reconstitute the haemopoietic system, post transplantation.

Dr Robert Nordon graduated from the University of New South Wales in 1986 with an MBBS and received his PhD in the field of Biomedical Engineering in 1994. He undertook postdoctoral research in The Terry Fox Laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, in experimental haematology, before returning to UNSW in 1997 to continue postdoctoral studies in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering on an ARC Australian Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and he has been Senior Lecturer in the same department since 2006.

Dr Clare Parish is a Senior Research Officer at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and jointly leads the Stem Cell team with Dr. Lachlan Thompson. The focus of the group is on the development of cell therapies for brain repair, notably for Parkinson’s Disease. The team has a strong emphasis also on understanding developmental biology, exploiting this knowledge to generate selective cell populations for the purpose of transplantation and, encouraging graft integration into the host brain.

Dr Pébay obtained her PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Paris VI in 2001 and subsequently joined Prof. Pera at Monash University to undertake research on human embryonic stem cells (hESC). She then continued her research in this area at the University of Melbourne where she commenced in 2007. Since 2012, Dr Pébay has been appointed to both the Centre for Eye Research Australia and The University of Melbourne.

Dr Joy Rathjen has worked on understanding the maintenance of pluripotency and directing the differentiation of pluripotent cells in culture for nearly 20 years. Dr Rathjen has played a pioneering role in defining and understanding pluripotent cell states in culture, primarily through identification and characterisation in culture of embryonic primitive ectoderm (EPL cells), a population with similarities to embryonic epiblast and hESC.

Professor Nadia Rosenthal was awarded a PhD in 1981 from Harvard Medical School and after a postdoctoral fellowship at NIH, directed a biomedical research laboratory at the Cardiovascular Research Center at Harvard Medical School. She served for a decade on the editorial staff at the New England Journal of Medicine, where she was Consultant of Molecular Medicine and Editor of the Molecular Medicine series. From 2001 she became Head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Mouse Biology Unit in Rome, where she was awarded EMBO membership, the Ferrari-Soave Prize in Cell Biology, and a Professorship of Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College London. She is currently Founding Director of the newly formed Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. She spearheaded the election of Australia to EMBL as its first Associate Member, and serves as EMBL Australia’s Scientific Head. She is an NHMRC Australia Fellow.

Professor Pankaj Sah is has been at the forefront of discovery and study of circuits and synapses in the mammalian central nervous system. He was involved in pioneering the technique of whole-cell electrophysiological recordings in acute brain slices. This is now the standard recording technique for electrophysiological recordings in brain slices. These initial studies provided the first description of the biophysical properties of excitatory synapses in the hippocampus, a region important for learning and memory formation (Journal of Physiology, 1989).

Professor Ed Stanley is located at the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories (MISCL), Monash University. An NHMRC Senior Research Fellow, Stanley’s contribution to the Stem Cells Australia initiative will be expertise relating to the growth and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. His laboratory has established protocols for the large-scale growth of undifferentiated hESCs (Curr Protoc Stem Cell Biol, 1:1C.1.1 - 1C.1.7, 2007), for their directed differentiation (Nature Protocols, 2 : 792-796, 2007) and genetic manipulation (Nature Protocols, 3: 768-776, 2008). Professor Stanley’s laboratory has also recently imported a number of human iPSC lines and demonstrated that these cells can be grown and differentiated using protocols developed for hESC lines. Together with Professor Andrew Elefanty, Professor Stanley jointly manages the Victorian branch of the Australian Stem Cell Centre Core facility (StemCore), providing Stem Cell Australia with access to resources and cell lines currently held within this laboratory.

Dr Lachlan Thompson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and jointly leads the Stem Cell team with Dr. Clare Parish. The focus of the group is on the development of cell therapies for brain repair. The research program includes projects aimed at treating various neurological conditions, including: Parkinson’s disease, Stroke, Motor Neuron Disease, Huntington’s disease and traumatic brain injury.

Associate Professor Ann Turnley’s major research interest is in the area of neuronal development, differentiation and regeneration of the nervous system after injury/disease. Her focus is on regulation of signal transduction pathways that promote neuronal differentiation and neurite outgrowth using a wide range of molecular cellular and histological skills to grow, analyse and manipulate embryonic neonatal and adult neural stem cells in vitro. This work is complemented by analysis of a range of primary neural cells (cortical, hippocampal and sensory neurons and glial cells).

Dr Christine Wells uses systems-wide technologies to interrogate cellular differentiation and activation in the context of inflammatory disease. Wells has built innovative bioinformatic and cell biology approaches to understanding cellular phenotypes from large-scale genetic and transcriptome datasets. Dr Wells has developed significant international collaborations to drive cross-disciplinary research in stem cell biology, inflammation and neurological disease.

Associate Professor Wolvetang is both one of the leading iPS cell researchers in Australia and one of the few stem cell biologists with the necessary cross-disciplinary expertise that is required for the development of the microfluidic platforms that will be used to generate and direct human iPSC, as proposed in this bid. His leadership in the ASCC funded “Reprogramming and induction of pluripotency” stream has made this stream one of the more successful programs in that endeavour and has, in a short time, given considerable impetus to iPSC research in Australia.