Dr Luke Whiley is a dementia researcher whose work focuses on understanding how the body’s metabolism, particularly the biology of fats known as lipids, influences our health throughout ageing.

His research explores how the body responds to illness, lifestyle, and environmental stress at a chemical level, and how these responses shape longterm disease risk. Using advanced blood-based measurement technologies, Dr Whiley studies thousands of small molecules at once to build a snapshot of a person’s metabolic health. By combining these measurements with data science approaches, his work identifies biological pathways that become disrupted in disease, providing insight into why some people are more vulnerable to conditions such as dementia.

Assoc Prof Viet Tran has built Emergency Medicine Research in Tasmania from the ground up, which has culminated in the success of a AUD$3 million Australian Government Medical Research Futures Fund grant looking into the Implementation of Clinical Pathways for Acute Care in Tasmania project. Dr Tran is also the Emergency Medicine Discipline lead within the Tasmanian School of Medicine and has key roles to play within Emergency Medicine training. He feels privileged to be able to teach and mentor across the whole spectrum of becoming a doctor, from watching students grow into junior doctors, senior registrar and as fellow medical specialists.

A landmark study led by WEHI and La Trobe University has found a potential new diagnostic marker that could be used to better detect the level of tissue damage in our bodies.

This study revealed, for the first time, a link between levels of EVs in the blood and tissue damage caused by diseases such as leukaemia.

Researchers hope to leverage the critical new insight to develop a blood test to monitor cancer patients with tissue damage, which could, in future, enhance treatment strategies for blood cancers and other diseases.