3T Event: IMB under the microscope

We are pleased to invite you to join us for a very special afternoon at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), UQ St Lucia.

 

Every cure starts with a scientific discovery by someone who imagined a better future. At IMB, their goal is to create a better future by making breakthrough discoveries to improve health and wellbeing.

 

During this 3T Event, Dr Zeinab Kahlil will discuss antimicrobial awareness and the citizen science project, Soils for Science. Following this, researchers will lead you on a tour of the state-of-the-art facilities where they are looking to nature to find answers to global health challenges. Note, you will be required to choose between one of two tour options in the registration process.

 

This event is only accessible to people over the age of 15 and attendees must wear fully enclosed, fluid resistant shoes that cover the entire foot.

 

Dr Zeinab Khalil completed a Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Sciences with Honours at Egypt’s Helwan University before embarking on a Master of Microbiology and Immunology. She then moved to Queensland where she was awarded a PhD scholarship, completing her PhD studies under Professor Capon's supervision. Dr Khalil is currently a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and Managing Director of Soils for Science, an exciting citizen science project that all Australians are invited to take part in.  She will be showcasing the Soils for Science lab and explaining how new life-saving medicine leads could be hiding in your backyard!

 

Dani Rojas-Azofeifa’s journey into science started in Costa Rica, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Biology and then completed her MSc in Biochemistry and Cellular Physiology at The University of Costa Rica. In her masters, she studied the characterisation of the venom and bioinsecticidal potential of toxins from a Costa Rican scorpion. After meeting her current supervisor Professor Glenn King at a conference and expressing her interest in exploring the potential of using animal venoms to understand and treat human pathologies, she received an international PhD scholarship from The University of Queensland. She started her PhD at the King lab in January 2020. Her PhD project aims to explore small molecules as drugs to treat heart attacks and heart failure. During the tour, she will explain how the venoms of different insects and arachnids can be used and studied for therapeutics in various diseases.

 

Dr Nicholas Condon is a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist and senior microscopist in the Institute’s Microscopy core facility. In his role Nicholas works collaboratively with our researchers on the cutting-edge microscopes housed in the core facility and helps them create custom tools to process and analyse the images and movies captured on these devices. Dr Nicholas Condon will show-case some of the amazing technology available at the IMB that enhances our institute’s research capabilities. Working with many of the researchers within the institute he will take you on a visual journey across the scales of bacteria to whole organisms, showing you that seeing really is believing when it comes to biological research.

 

Dr Yen-Hua Huang obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Queensland in 2010 and has been a postdoctoral fellow at IMB since then. Dr Yen-Hua Huang has more than 10 years of experience in synthetic peptide chemistry, analytical chemistry and in vitro assay development. Currently, she is interested in the structure-activity relationships of biologically active peptides and has focused her research on methods to enhance biopharmaceutical properties of peptides, including their in vivo stability, cell permeability and penetration, and efficacy towards intracellular oncogenic targets, especially leukaemia-associated proteins. She will showcase how their team design and produce new generation of pharmaceuticals in plants during this tour.