Student Opportunities

SAHMRI researchers are committed to transforming innovative health and medical research into practical benefits for patients and the community. In each of our seven research themes that address some of the most pressing and critical problems that confront our health and wellbeing today, our researchers are focusing their efforts on developing and pioneering new treatments. In addition, they are taking the lead in clinical trials that will help inform future research activities across the globe.

The Mind and Brain Theme aims to train and mentor students who will be future leaders in psychiatry, neuroscience and population health research. The Mind and Brain Theme joins together two major research concentrations that examine the mind and brain utilising psychiatry, neuroscience and public health methods. The impact on society of diseases and disorders of the brain is immense. One would be hard pressed to find a single Australian family that is not directly or indirectly affected by brain or mind disorder of some kind. It is critical therefore critical for SAHMRI to have a vigorous and highly productive program of research into the mind and brain that integrates and advances research in this field. This theme investigates the whole continuum of the mind and brain from mental health and resilience to disorders such as depression and anxiety; from wellbeing to neurological dysfunction.

Projects:

Neil Sachse Centre for Spinal Cord Research

Project 1: Project Discovery – Biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of spinal cord injury

Mind and Brain Clinical Laboratory

Project 2: Clinical investigation of functional genetic variants and environmental factors in major depression

Project 3: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: leptin, interleukin 6 and clinical symptoms

Project 4: Group psychological intervention for people with depression and overweight/obesity

Project 6: Mental Health Assessment and Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia

Laboratory for Human Neurophysiology and Genetics

We are currently seeking two PhD students to take part of a project at the forefront of pre-clinical neuroscience in the Laboratory for Human Neurobiology, under Dr Bardy's supervision:

Project 7: Studying Parkinson’s disease in vitro with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)

Project 8: Studying the genetic predispositions of Psychiatric disorders in vitro with human iPSC

Project 9: Developing innovative biotechnologies to discover treatments for brain disorders

The selected students will be given training in advanced cellular neuroscience techniques including:

Tissue culture: Making human brain cells in a lab dish from induced pluripotent stem cells

Neurobiology: Electrophysiology and imaging on live neurons from patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders

Human genetics: In-depth molecular biology including single-cell Next Generation Sequencing

Bioinformatics: Analysis of experimental data (Python, R and Matlab programming).

For further information on any of the above projects, please contact:

Dr Michael Musker, Bellberry Research Fellow

Dr Martin Lewis, Research Fellow

Dr Cedric Bardy, Senior Research Fellow