Keeping our best young bioscience brains in Australia: Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize

Tamzin on 14 November, 2012

The winner of the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize will be announced at 12.30 pm, Thursday 15 November 2012, at a lunch at UBS in Sydney.

He will receive $25,000, and a glass trophy designed by Australian sculptor Nick Mount.

The 2012 finalists are:

  • Robert McLaughlin, a medical engineer from the University of Western Australia (UWA), who has developed an optical probe that fits inside a hypodermic needle and can help surgeons accurately determine the boundaries of breast cancer tumours.
  • Marc Pellegrini, from Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI), whose discoveries about how the body regulates its immune system are being applied to clinical trials of cancer vaccines and treatments for HIV and hepatitis.
  • Jian Yang, from the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland, who has solved a major puzzle of missing heritability by developing software and methods to determine the multiple genes involved in conditions such as schizophrenia, obesity and diabetes.