Researchers receive $1.46m in government grants

The grants were awarded to three separate projects in the field of vision science and were headlined by a $707,370 five-year research fellowship awarded to Centre for Eye Research Australia (CERA) mber Professor Paul Baird. Research fellowships are highly competitive and are only awarded to researchers with a sustained track record of significant and high quality output, who are generally in the top 10% of their field and are viewed as ‘pushing the boundaries’.{{quote-a:r-w:450-I:2-Q:“The fellowship will allow me to identify disease markers in patients who exhibit disease progression as well as offer a precision medicine approach based on the identification of individuals most likely to respond.”-WHO:Professor Paul Baird, CERA mber and fellowship awardee}}The molecular geneticist and principal investigator heads Ocular Genetics at CERA, and leads a research team actively involved in international consortia. Their research focuses on the identification of genes and determinants involved in several major eye diseases including glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, myopia and keratoconus.Following the announcent, Baird said he was delighted to receive the grant, which will commence in 2018.“The fellowship will allow me to identify disease markers in patients who exhibit disease progression as well as offer a precision medicine approach based on the identification of individuals most likely to respond to a specific treatment or combination of treatments to allow improved outcomes for patients,” Baird said.He also thanked the NHMRC for its support and said it “strongly underscores our ground breaking work in eye disease.”Macquarie University’s Dr Vivek Gupta received a $431,000 career development fellowship to continue his work investigated the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the eye. Dr Alice Brandli from the University of Melbourne was awarded nearly $319,000 for her work on the role of estrogen signalling in the development and progress of neovascularisation in macular degeneration.In total $197,249,305 in medical research grants were awarded by the NHMRC in current funding allocation. The $1.46 million awarded to vision science research equates to 0.74% of the total grants, which is under the 1% average that ophthalmic researchers have received since 2011.