ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE TO FUNCTION OF LUNG EPITHELIAL STEM CELL BIOLOGY
Dr Clare Weeden
Laboratory Head
The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI)
Melbourne, Australia
RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Melbourne, Australia | March 2025
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.
Dr Weeden completed her PhD studying lung squamous cell carcinoma initiation and treatment with Professor Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat at WEHI, where she discovered distinct DNA repair abilities in lung stem cells that enabled their susceptibility to cancer, published in PLOS Biology.
Dr Weeden conducted postdoctoral research at WEHI and found that the pre-existing lung immune microenvironment had lasting effects on tumour immunogenicity and response to immunotherapy, published in Cancer Cell. She then continued her research on early tumour biology in Professor Charles Swanton’s laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, London, where she was part of a team discovery that air pollution triggers inflammatory signalling in the lung that awakens previously dormant cells to initiate lung cancers in people who don’t smoke, published in Nature.
Dr Weeden is the past recipient of prestigious fellowships (Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions, Lung Foundation Australia Deep Manchanda Early Career Fellowship), research grants (Cancer Research UK, Mark Foundation, Cure Cancer/Cancer Australia) and has published 36 research publications with over 1000 citations.
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Stem cells used for age-related macular degeneration
Dr. Jenna Hall is a passionate and accomplished biologist with expertise in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) culture, disease modelling, and high-throughput automated systems. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, where her research focused on using iPSC-derived retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells to study age-related macular degeneration. Dr Hall’s technical skillset spans manual and automated cell reprogramming and differentiation, quantitative microscopy-based phenotyping, and large scale -omics analysis.
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Hormone receptor positive breast cancer and therapy resistance
Prof Elgene Lim is a medical oncologist at St Vincent’s Hospital and Head of the Connie Johnson Breast Cancer Research Lab at the Garvan Institute. Following his PhD at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute where he identified the aberrant cells in carriers of the BRCA1 mutant gene, a hereditary breast cancer syndrome as the culprit cells giving rise to breast cancer, he furthered his research and clinical training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He was awarded the National Breast Cancer Foundation Practitioner Fellowship in 2014 and returned from Boston to Australia. In 2017, he was awarded the inaugural National Breast Cancer Foundation Endowed Chair, and subsequently appointed the Principal Cancer Theme Lead at UNSW.
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Exercise therapy for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease
Dr Shelley Keating is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Exercise Physiology and Accredited Exercise Physiologist from the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Queensland. With a strong grounding in exercise metabolism and body composition, Dr Keating’s research centres on the utility of exercise as a therapy for obesity and related cardiometabolic conditions, notably metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
