UTS team takes research to the world

A team of scientists and university administrators from the University of Technology, Sydney, has returned from a world tour that established new contacts and showcased the University's research activities.

Stephan Wellink, director of the university's R&D office, led the group, which included Prof Don Martin of the Department of Health Sciences, Prof Ann Simpson of Cell and Molecular Biology, acting director of the Institute for the Biotechnology of Infectious Diseases Prof Nick Smith, and Paul Field, the R&D office's technology development manager.

The researchers visited Toronto, New York, Washington and the Netherlands, meeting with representatives from academia, industry and government.

Wellink said that the tour offered the researchers a lesson in globalisation, and an opportunity to see how commercialisation and venture capital worked overseas, and was enormously valuable in building contacts and forming alliances.

"We went to Bio 2002, and on either side of the event we had a number of meetings," Wellink said. "We've formed a couple of new relationships and have a couple of new projects. It was very useful for us."

One of the most promising new links could be with a French company, which is interested in a diagnostic test for diabetic retinopathy developed by Prof Martin and his team at UTS.

Now the team is busy following up all of the leads they made during the trip. According to Wellink, there are definitely plans to do this kind of tour again. "Next time we'll go back with more targeted discussions," he explained.

Wellink said he believed the trip was critically important to UTS and said that other Australian universities and institutes should be considering similar strategies.

"There's no point in having the best research in the world if no one knows you're doing it," he said. "The best way to do it is face to face."