Dr Jade Murray, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University
VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
Bench Side Story continues with a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, AUSTRALIA.
Dr. Jade M. Murray completed a PhD programme at the Monash University Sleep and Circadian Medicine Laboratory in 2018. Dr. Murray’s broad research interests include studying the effects of circadian misalignment on overall health in both healthy and sleep disordered populations and developing simplified methods for determining the timing of circadian phase. An important innovation in her work has been tracking light-dark exposure data over time to build predictive models of circadian timing for development of personalised delivery systems for sleep-wake interventions to improve health and lifestyle outcomes.
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Ocular disease and early onset myopia
Dr Mountford has successfully established Western Australia’s first and only ocular genetic screening platform using zebrafish and utilises this model to help elucidate some of the complex gene-environment interactions responsible for the development of myopia.
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Oral administration of insulin for Type 1 Diabetes
Huiwen Pang is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, University of Queensland, focusing on biomedical health research. Prior to commencing his PhD, Huiwen studied animal genetics in his Masters degree at Huazhong Agriculture University in China.
People with diabetes, especially Type 1 diabetes, largely rely on the insulin injections or insulin pumps to control their high blood glucose levels, which is painful and has a high risk of infections.
Huiwen Pang is conducting research on nano-based drug formulations for Type 1 diabetes treatment, with a focus on using nanomaterials to load insulin for oral administration and employing anti-apoptotic and anti-inflammatory approaches to mitigate damage to beta cells.
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Environmental exposure to function of lung epithelial stem cell biology
Dr Clare Weeden has recently commenced as a Laboratory Head at WEHI in 2025, supported by the CSL Centenary Fellowship.
Dr Weeden specialises in lung epithelial cell biology in the context of homeostasis, inflammation, and lung cancer, particularly in people who don’t smoke. Her work endeavours to understand how past environmental exposures shape the responses of lung cells and the molecular mechanisms underlying this cellular recall, with the aim to develop novel early detection strategies for lung disease.
