METABOLIC PHENOTYPING, LIPIDOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS IN DEMENTIA
With
Dr Luke Whiley
Curtin Medical Research Institute,
Western Australia
RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Perth, Western Australia | February 2026
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.
A major focus of Dr Whiley’s research is Alzheimer’s disease, where he investigates how genetic risk, particularly variations in genes involved in lipid transport, may affect metabolism across the body and lead to disease. This work highlights the importance of lipids in brain health, helping shift dementia research beyond proteins alone to include broader metabolic processes.
He also studies related questions in Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and COVID19, where metabolic disruption plays a key role in recovery and longterm outcomes. Alongside discovery research, Dr Whiley develops methods that allow detailed metabolic testing using much smaller samples, making future screening and monitoring more accessible.
His overarching goal is to improve understanding, earlier detection, and prevention of neurodegenerative disease, while keeping people with lived experience at the centre of dementia research.
Source: Supplied
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9088-4799
-
Inner ear organoids for the study of human hearing and balance
Dr Jackie Ogier is an auditory neuroscientist, with a research focus on the molecular biology of hair cells, the specialised sensory receptors in the ear that detect sound and balance. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of A/Prof Bryony Nayagam, supported by a prestigious Passe and Williams foundation fellowship.
Dr Ogier’s experience broadly spans the genetics of hearing loss, disease modelling, micro dissection, primary cell culture, stem cell culture, organoids, and proteomics. Overall, she aims to generate knowledge of hearing and vestibular sensory biology.
-
Impact of Leukaemia Foundation’s Research Funding into Blood Cancer
Bill Stavreski is the Head of Research at the Leukaemia Foundation who talks about the research impact in recent years. The Foundation itself marks its 25th anniversary in 2025, having funded a wide range of health and medical research since 2000. With a focus on basic science, health services research, treatment, and care, the organisation has invested nearly $90 million (adjusted in current dollars terms) in approximately 370 research grants over the years.
-
Pregnancy in women with chronic kidney disease
Professor Shilpanjali Jesudason is an academic nephrologist and Head of Department at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s Central Northern Adelaide Renal and Transplant Service, South Australia.
From 2017-2020, she was the Clinical Director of Kidney Health Australia, the peak body for patients with kidney disease. In this role she developed a passion for advancing kidney disease education in primary care.
