ELECTRICAL STIMULATION ON ORGANIC CONDUCTORS
With
Distinguished Professor Gordon Wallace AO,
Executive Research Director
Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI)
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia | November 2025
Professor Gordon Wallace AO is the Founder and Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) at the University of Wollongong and Founding Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) Materials Node. He was previously the Executive Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).
He was awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship in Nanobionics in 2011, appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his commitment to research collaboration and innovation in 2017, elected as a Fellow, Royal Society of NSW in 2017, and appointed to Prime Ministers Knowledge Nation 100 in 2015. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2022.
Over his career, Professor Wallace has attracted over $100M in competitive funding and his team was awarded an ARC Centre ($7.3M over 5 years) in 2003, which was subsequently upgraded in 2005 to an ARC Centre of Excellence ($14M over 5 years). A 3-year extension ($7.5M) of this Centre was awarded in 2010.
In 2014 he led a team successful in attracting a further 7 years ($25M) funding to ACES. This core funding has been supplemented by an ARC Federation Fellowship and Laureate Fellowship, ARC and NHMRC project grants, CRC projects (CRC Polymer a,CRC Hearing and Marine Bioproducts CRC), funding from the Defence Advanced Research Program Agency (USA), CSIRO, DSTO, the NSW Government and recently MTP Connect and ARENA.
In 2009, he was instrumental in attracting $50M in Federal Government funding to establish a Materials Processing and Device Fabrication Facility at UOW. To date, he is the Chief Scientist on the ($35M) BIENCO project and belongs on the Executive Committee Board alongside BIENCO CEO Danielle Fisher and Project Lead Gerard Sutton.
Since 2023, Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) has also been a crucial member of BIENCO, a world-first consortium of clinical practitioners, researchers and bioengineers addressing the global challenge of corneal blindness. He has published in excess of 1,200 refereed journal publications that have attracted more than 72,000 citations with an H-index of 123 (Scopus).He is named as a co-inventor on more than 60 patents. He is the lead author on three monographs entitled “Organic Bionics” (Wiley- VCH 2012), “Intelligent Polymer Systems” and “3D Bioprinting: Printing Parts for Bodies” (2014) and has also authored an additional 38 book chapters.
Source: Supplied
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0381-7273
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Vision impairment in children and the impact on children and their families
Dr Sue Silveira holds a conjoint academic position with Macquarie University and is the Course Director for their Master of Disability Studies, which is administered and delivered by NextSense Institute in affiliation with the University. She teaches in the areas of vision impairment and disability, and aims to share her knowledge while learning from others, especially people who are blind or have low vision and their families.
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Metabolic phenotyping, lipidomics & bioinformatics in dementia
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.
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Optimising Rural Musculoskeletal Health
Adnan Asger Ali is a Director of Accelerate Physiotherapy and PhD candidate at The University of Sydney, where he is researching implementation strategies for musculoskeletal care pathways in rural Australia as part of the PACE-RURAL project.
A passionate advocate for physiotherapy, Adnan serves as Chair of the Australian Physiotherapy Association’s National Musculoskeletal Committee and sits on the Capital Health Network’s Clinical Council. His commitment to clinical excellence was recognised when he received Physiotherapist of the Year at the 2023 Allied Health Awards.
