Gender equity introduced to Viertel Foundation fellowships

The Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation Senior Medical Research Fellowships are being awarded to one male and one female outstanding mid-career scientist for the first time, in a move which will see gender equity embedded in the awards from now on.

The winners of the 2016 fellowships are Dr Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat, group leader, Stem Cells and Cancer division, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research; and Dr Thomas Gebhardt, senior research fellow at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (The University of Melbourne). Each fellow will receive $1.225 million ($245,000 per year for five years) to undertake leading-edge research in their area of expertise.

Dr Asselin-Labat’s research addresses critical issues in lung development, repair and cancer. The findings will help explain what happens in underdeveloped lungs in premature infants; how to improve lung repair after injury or disease; and how to identify better markers/drug targets to detect or treat lung cancer more effectively. By identifying the factors that control embryonic lung development and adult lung remodelling by stem cells, she and her team will define the molecular events that are critical in normal lung formation that may be altered in lung disorders such as respiratory distress syndrome of prematurity.

Dr Gebhardt, meanwhile, will study the area of immune defence in peripheral organs. His team was the first to describe a type of immune cells that permanently guard barrier tissues such as skin and gut where they provide local protection from renewed infection; now, they will study these frontline cells in a range of models to understand how precisely they control local infection and whether they may also contribute to other diseases, such as cancer. It is envisaged these studies will find new ways to harness these peripheral immune cells in order to prevent or treat infectious diseases, chronic inflammation or cancer.

The chairman of the Viertel Foundation’s Medical Advisory Board, Professor Peter Leedman, said the board had made the recommendation to the trustees for fellowships to be awarded to one man and one woman each year in recognition that gender equity in science was a significant issue and that in recent years the awards had seen a growing prevalence of male recipients.

“This seemed out of step with the high quality of science being conducted around Australia by top young female scientists,” Professor Leedman said. “As a consequence, the board changed the assessment process for 2015, and it was extremely impressed with the outstanding quality in both female and male applicant categories. With the support of the Viertel Foundation trustees, the Medical Advisory Board will continue this approach going forward.”