AMBeR Mentors
It was suggested that it would be extremely beneficial for the AMBeR Fellows (Postdocs) and Scholars (PhD students) to have a range of experts accessible for research and research career advice. We have assigned Mentors to each new Fellow/Scholar within the network. The Mentors do not necessarily have to be from the same institute or research field, however, they will be of great benefit to the individual Fellows due to their wealth of research experience, knowledge and skills. The group of AMBeR Mentors is comprised of the AMBeR Management Committee and local and international researchers from institutes involved in the AMBeR network. We are also actively engaged in seeking additional research Mentors.
AMBeR Director
Professor Lyle Palmer
The University of Western Australia
Professor Palmer is an internationally renowned geneticist and epidemiologist who is an expert in the genetics of complex respiratory diseases. He is the Foundation Chair in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Western Australia, where he is also a Professor in the Schools of Medicine & Pharmacology and Population Health. He is the founder of the Laboratory for Genetic Epidemiology in the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research. Before returning to Western Australia in mid-2003, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Statistical Genomics at the Channing Laboratory, Boston.
AMBeR Executive
Professor John Hopper
The University of Melbourne
Professor Hopper is a NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and Professorial Fellow with a PhD in Mathematical Statistics. He has published more than 250 papers on the statistical methodology and its application for analysing twin and family data, addressing the genetic and environmental causes of variation in health-related characteristics. Applications include blood lead levels, bone density, mammographic density, blood pressure and other cardiovascular risk factors.
Professor Fiona Stanley
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research
Professor Stanley studied medicine at the University of Western Australia and undertook further training in the United Kingdom and United States of America in epidemiology, biostatistics and public health. She is the Founding Director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Western Australia, Professor in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at University Of Western Australia and the Executive Director of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, a national organisation that was formally constituted in June 2002 with an agenda to improve the health and well-being of young Australians. Professor Stanley was Australian of the Year in 2003.
Professor Bruce Armstrong
The University of Sydney
Professor Armstrong graduated in biochemistry and medicine from the University of Western Australia, trained as a physician at the Royal Perth Hospital and as an epidemiologist with Sir Richard Doll at the University of Oxford. He has variously been Professor of Epidemiology and Cancer Research at the University of Western Australia, Commissioner of Health for Western Australia, Head of the School of Public Health at The University of Sydney and Director of Research at the Sydney Cancer Centre. He is known nationally and internationally as an authority on the causes and prevention of skin cancer and melanoma and has made important contributions to knowledge on the causes and control of other cancers, high blood pressure and heart disease. His present major research interests are in the genetic and environmental epidemiology of cancer and the quality and performance of cancer services.
Professor Adrian Baddeley
The University of Western Australia
Professor Baddeley is one of Australia's top statisticians. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, winner of the Pitman Medal and the Hannan Medal, he is a specialist in statistical ways of interpreting spatial and geometrical information such as microscope images of biological tissue; the spatial arrangement of animals territories, trees in a wood or copper deposits in a mining area; and spatial patterns generated by random accidents such as crystal defects in semiconductors. Professor Baddeley is very keen on statistical computing and on developing software.
Professor John Eisman
Garvan Institute of Medical Research
Professor Eisman AO is a Professor of Medicine (Conjoint) of the University of New South Wales, a Staff Endocrinologist at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, and Director of the Bone and Mineral Research Program at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. The focus of his research is the genetics and epidemiology of osteoporosis, encompassing twin and population studies as well as molecular and cellular mechanisms for gene effects. He was awarded the Sir Eric Sussman Award by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1995, and was honoured with an Order of Australia in 1997.
Professor James Semmens
Curtin University of Technology
Professor Semmens is currently the Head of the Centre for Health Services Research within the School of Public Health at Curtin University of Technology. Prior to this he was the Director of the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Western Australia. His expertise is in the biostatistical analysis of linked health data and their effective use in evaluating clinical epidemiology, health care utilization and outcomes. Professor Semmens has led the WA Safety and Quality of Surgical Care Project and the WA Audit of Surgical Mortality and has facilitated the enhancement of linked records such as the Commonwealth PBS, Medicare and Aged Care datasets.
AMBeR Mentors
A/Professor Leigh Blizzard
Menzies Research Institute / University of Tasmania
Professor Matthew Brown
The University of Queensland
Professor Brown qualified in medicine from the University of Sydney, Australia and has worked in Oxford on studies of the genetics of human rheumatic diseases since 1994. He was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Arthritis Research Campaign in 2000, and in 2004 was appointed Professor of Musculoskeletal Genetics at University of Oxford. His research has been in the field of complex rheumatic diseases, in which many genes and environmental factors interact to influence the disease concerned. He has particularly been engaged in researching ankylosing spondylitis, which is the second most common form of inflammatory arthritis worldwide, affecting one in 300 to one in 500 people, making it as common as type one diabetes. In 2005 Professor Brown was appointed to the Chair of Immunogenetics at University of Queensland, based at the Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research, Brisbane.
Dr Graham Byrnes
The University of Melbourne
Dr Byrnes is a statistician and mathematician (PhD in Applied Mathematics) with a variety of research interests within the Centre and through outside collaborations. He is currently involved in modeling the development and progression of Ductal Carcinoma in situ; developing reliable methods of using tissue samples to predict genetic risks for Breast Cancer; developing methods of analysis of genetic data from a mixture of families and unrelated individuals; and developing techniques for reliable interpretation of quantitative RT-PCR.
Dr Kim Carter
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research
Dr Carter joined the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in 2008. He is a key member of the Western Australian Cardiovascular Genetics Group and the WA Cardiovascular Consortium. Dr Carter is actively involved in research projects to determine how genetic and environmental factors contribute to the development, and risk of development, of cardiovascular disease. He is also the principal analyst for the International Consortium for the Genetics of Ankylosing Spondylitis.
Professor Nick de Klerk
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research
Professor de Klerk joined the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in 2000 after leading the Occupational Respiratory Epidemiology Group in the Department of Public Health at the University of Western Australia for 10 years. Before that he gained broad experience in biostatistics and epidemiology both in Western Australia and England. He is currently the Head of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.
Dr Stuart MacGregor
Queensland Institute of Medical Research
Dr MacGregor's area of primary interest is statistical genetics. Within this field he has had success working on traits ranging from bipolar disorder in psychiatry through to cardiovascular related traits such as BMI. His work in psychiatry has included work on analysis of large pedigrees and this remains an area of active research. He has an interest in dissecting the genetic basis of quantitative traits and his work has included new statistical methods for analysis of multivariate data. His most recent research is on analysis of genome wide association data, with a focus on statistical analysis of data from DNA pooling experiments.
Pamela McCaskie
The University of Western Australia
Ms McCaskie is a genetic statistician with applied and methodological interests in the genetics of complex human disease. She is currently completing a PhD at the Laboratory for Genetic Epidemiology, Western Australian Institute for Medical Research. Her current research involves applied and methodological aspects of haplotype imputation, analysis, as well as the analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism and epidemiological data and software development for such analyses. This research is primarily involved with phenotypes associated with cardiovascular disease. She has been working with a cardiovascular research group at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital since January 2004, providing statistical support and analysis.
Dr Katrina Scurrah
The University of Melbourne
Dr Scurrah completed a BMath (Hons) degree in statistics at the University of Newcastle , NSW, in 1995. This was followed by a PhD in genetic statistics through the University of Western Australia (awarded in 2002). After spending the latter half of her PhD studies at the University of Leicester, UK, she remained in Leicester for a year as a postdoctoral researcher (joint position with Leeds University), and also worked briefly at the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas' Hospital, London. She joined The University of Melbourne in 2004 as a genetic statistician working mainly on the Victorian Family Heart Study. Dr Scurrah's major research areas are biostatistics and genetic epidemiology. She is involved in both the development of novel statistical methods for genetic and correlated data (particularly familial data), using a Bayesian approach and computer-intensive techniques such as Gibbs sampling (in BUGS and WinBUGS), and the application of these methods in complex human disease epidemiology including cardiovascular and opthalmologic genetics.
Dr Jim Stankovich
Menzies Research Institute / University of Tasmania
Dr Stankovich completed a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Melbourne in 1999. He now works as a genetic statistician at the Menzies Research Institute in Hobart and the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. He is particularly interested in inferring genealogical relationships from genotype data, and using large families and distant genealogical links to map rare disease susceptibility alleles. He currently applies these techniques to studies of multiple sclerosis, prostate cancer and haematological cancers.
