Postdoctoral research fellow Dr Jennifer Payne has been awarded a prestigious Victoria Fellowship to expand her work using cutting-edge techniques to develop new treatments to battle the antibiotic-resistant ‘superbug’.

Congratulations to EMBL Australia Group Leader Associate Professor Max Cryle, who has been awarded a Career Development Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council. 

News this quarter:

• Our Partner Laboratory Network is expanding and we’re looking for new group leaders
• Nobel Laureate imparts lessons in perseverance to PhD Course students
• Antibiotic insight may help in battle against ‘superbugs’
• EMBL Australia PhD Course: 60 students, 57 presenters, 10 big days
• EMBL alumni in Australia come together for the first time
• PhD student’s imaging app impresses at VIZBI

And more:

• Upcoming events
• Jobs at EMBL Australia

With three new institutions joining our Partner Laboratory Network, we're searching for three ambitious early-career researchers to become EMBL Australia Group Leaders in the areas of Bioinformatics, Cancer Genomics and Host Pathogen Interactions.

A young member of EMBL Australia’s Partner Laboratory Network took out the award for the best scientific poster at the Visualizing Biological Data (VIZBI 2017) conference in June.

On 9 June, many of the 74 EMBL alumni now living in Australia, as well as their colleagues and networks, congregated at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney for the first EMBL alumni event to be held in Australia. 

Dozens of life science leaders from across the nation – and several from across the globe – travelled to Melbourne to share their expertise with sixty hand-picked young scientists at the 4^th EMBL Australia PhD Course.

Professor Ada Yonath is not one to back away from a challenge. It was this grit and determination that saw the Israeli crystallographer - and Nobel Laureate - overcome injury and jet lag to spend more than two hours entertaining and inspiring students at the EMBL Australia PhD Course.

EMBL Australia has continued to thrive as a research organisation with strong local and international linkages. In 2016, the Partner Laboratory Network almost doubled in size, with four new and promising early-career researchers establishing their laboratories at our existing host institutes and more institutes coming on board, and we continued to strengthen ties between the international and Australian research communities.

EMBL Australia Group Leader Associate Professor Cryle co-led a team of researchers who have identified a key part of the process by which a common clinical antibiotic is formed – a finding that could potentially pave the way for novel compounds to tackle the problem of bacterial resistance. With 'superbugs' responsible for around 700,000 deaths globally a year, new types of antibiotics are urgently needed.