Highlights from MWC’s 2018 Research Symposium & Future Science Day
22 December 2018
The Maurice Wilkins Centre’s 2018 Research Symposium and Future Science Day, held at the University of Auckland on the 6th and 7th December was attended by a record number of participants and showcased excellent science being done by MWC investigators.
This year’s annual symposium was a great opportunity for our investigators from around the country to get together, exchange ideas and share research findings, as well as to celebrate the year and what we’ve achieved.
More than 200 attendees turned out for the two-day event held in and around the newly opened Kathleen Curtis Atrium in the University of Auckland’s Science Faculty.
The theme for the symposium on the first day was ‘What to do when drugs don’t work’. The audience was treated to presentations on a range of topics from how to improve treatment of diabetes to better targeting of cancer drugs and the development of potential new drugs to deal with the rising wave of antimicrobial resistance. The MWC was delighted to also have two international collaborators present at the symposium: Professor Ke Ding from Jinan University in China and Dr Debbie Williamson from The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Debbie Williamson, Deputy Director of the MDU PHL at the Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne, delivers a keynote on research into the use of genomics to combat antimicrobial resistance.
Keynote speaker Ke Ding from the School of Pharmacy, Jinan University in Guangzhou, talks about data from research into how we can overcome the problem of clinical acquired drug resistance.
The Future Science Day on Friday 7th Dec was planned and run by the MWC Early Career Steering Committee, and gave selected emerging scientists the opportunity to present their research, network and get expert technical advice on issues related to their work. They also ran the very successful poster session on the Thursday evening, when 50 posters of very high quality were presented.
Speaker prizes went to Effie Fan (1st place) and Jennifer Eom (2nd place), while poster prizes were won by Elyse Williams (1st place), Aqfan Jamaluddin (2nd place) and Regan Fu (highly commended).
Top prize winners Effie Fan (left) and Elyse Williams.
The MWC Early Career Steering Committee. Back row l-r: Catherine Tsai , Marina Rajic, Joanna Hicks (Chair). Front row, l-r: Euan Roger, Iman Kavianinia, Kate Lee, Wanting Jiao, Indigo Matisi. Absent: Sunali Mehta.