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Melbourne has become home to me. And I've been a lot of different places in
the world, and there's a lot of nice places to be in the world, I used to live in Tokyo
and Paris and all these nice places, but coming home to Melbourne is always such a great pleasure.
I'm always happy to see the doors at the airport open and I can get a good cup of coffee for
a change after travelling all over around the world and I can come home to the best
coffee in the world. Being a part of RMIT and the research culture
of this building here it's rather exciting. We've had a bunch of new people just come
in, there's a few established people who are very capable researchers and as a group had
a very fortunate career to have to have such good students and good colleagues to make
me look good. So it's nice to have the opportunity to speak
to people about my experience, but had it not been for them it wouldn't have been nearly
as enjoyable as it has been. My research is mainly on things that are very
small. We work on quite a variety of devices for looking at diagnostics for medicine, for
surgery, for drug delivery. One of the things that attracted me to Melbourne
was the substantial concentration of research hospitals and all of the research in healthcare
that is occurring here. We're able to translate our research work
over into improving healthcare and lifestyle. And one of the areas of RMIT's interest.
We're working on a drug delivery device and also for vaccination.
The device is a hand held little nebuliser and it's able to nebulise even large molecules
that seem to be pretty promising for delivering a variety of cancer drugs and also a new generation
of vaccines that can be formed in a couple of weeks in response to an outbreak.
Another bit of work that we're working on is understanding quite a curious set of physical
phenomena, the formation of thin fluid films at the nano scale under exposure to ultrasound,
the formation of droplet rotation and particle motion and drops at very high frequencies
of excitation, the formation of capillary waves, a whole bunch of things that from a
physical standpoint shouldn't happen. From what we are seeing for example we are
able to take small droplets of blood and spin them at high speed and by spinning them we
are able to do centrifugation and separate out the red blood cells, white blood cells
and platelets and various things out of these, just a whole blood sample and in a sense it
replaces what an entire lab would do for you in a large centrifuge on a table with the
hand held device. Once we get going in understanding what's
happening we tend to find a lot of different applications and it's sort of an enjoyable
part of the job because you see solutions to long standing problems.
When I was awarded the Vice Chancellor's senior research fellowship I was thrilled at the
opportunity. Really what it provides me is the ability
to focus on the things that I'm really very good at, research activity, leadership aspects
and those sort of things, and just allows me an opportunity to focus to things that
are important to me really and by extension that are important to RMIT I hope.