Congratulations to Cimo Chen, who received a Cancer Research Training Award from the NIH National Cancer Institute. She will be working with Dr Amy Berrington as a postdoc at the National Institute of Health.

Congratulations to Kerri Viney, who started her fellowship in the Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm Sweden, in Professor Knut Lonnroth’s group.  Kerri also has a new PhD and a new MPhil student, each working on TB.

Research

Heath Kelly has been involved in developing options for a national co-ordinating centre for antimicrobial usage and resistance.  The final report on this has been accepted by the Commonwealth, and the second AMR summit was held in Melbourne this month.

We have all been busy writing rejoinders to reviewer comments on ARC and NHMRC grants.  Best of luck to everyone with a grant under review!

Conferences

Congratulations to Martyn Kirk for the very successful Communicable Diseases Control conference in Melbourne this month.   IDEM speakers at the conference included: Martyn Kirk, Laura Ford, Katie Glass, Emily Fearnley, Cameron Moffatt, and Danielle Ingle. MAE speakers included: Meru Sheel, Julie Collins, Brigitta Osterberger, Samuel McEwen, Johanna Dups, Zoe Cutcher, and Jonathan Malo.

As a satellite to the CDCC conference, Katie Glass helped run a workshop on “Understanding Infectious Disease Modelling”, Katrina Roper chaired a workshop on “Civil-Military Systems for collaborative responses to Infectious Disease and Deliberate Biological Events”, and Martyn chaired a workshop on Pathogen Genomics for Public Health.

Kerri Viney gave an invited talk on “Measuring the financial burden of tuberculosis: Tuberculosis patient cost surveys” at the Tuberculosis Centre of Research Excellence symposium in Sydney.  She has also had media coverage on her work on TB in the pacific.