The month of October has seen a change to the leadership of the School of Medical Sciences as we invest in a succession plan designed to develop additional leadership capability.

As announced earlier Laura Bennet has taken over from Alistair Gunn as the Head of the Department of Physiology, while Malcolm Tingle will replace Michelle Glass as the Head of the Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology. Michelle’s leadership is not going to be lost from the School as she will replace Roger Booth as the Academic Director of the School, a position which also serves as the Deputy Head of School.

The new Heads join the School executive who meets on the last Thursday of the month to make operational and strategic decisions about the allocation of resources across the School. Interestingly, at the last School Forum a number of staff admitted they did not know the composition of the School Executive.

Hence I think it is timely to use this opportunity to update staff on the current membership of the Executive:

• Paul Donaldson (HOS SMS)
• Michelle Glass (Academic Director)
• Nuala Helsby (SMS PG Director)
• Bill Denny (ACSRC)
• Peter Browett (MMP)
• Laura Bennet (Physiology)
• Alistair Young (Anatomy and Medical Imaging)
• Malcolm Tingle (Pharmacology)
• Clare Wall (Nutrition and Dietetics)
• Mike Findlay (Oncology)
• Gillian Nicholson (GSM) with support from Emi Barlow (Finance) and Virginia Moraes.  

In welcoming the new faces to the executive I also want to express my gratitude to Alistair and Roger who are stepping down from their respective roles. Knowing them both I know they will continue to play active roles within the School including mentoring their replacements into their new roles thereby ensuring that the transition and succession process proceeds smoothly.

We are planning events to thank them and I hope as many of you as possible can attend and thank in person for their efforts on your behalf.

Regards,

Professor Paul Donaldson
Head of School, School of Medical Sciences
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences

Dr Paulina Hanson-Manful, research fellow, has joined Dr Nikki Moreland's group from the School of Biological Sciences.

She completed her PhD studies at Massey University looking into the evolution of antibiotic resistance. 

Dr Hanson-Manful’s current research involves using molecular biology and protein biochemistry techniques to better understand Rheumatic Fever. Rheumatic Fever follows an untreated Group A Streptococcus infection and has very high rates in Maori and Pacific Island children in New Zealand. Her work aims to identify new biomarkers for better diagnosis of the disease and to investigate pathogenesis mechanisms.

SMS welcomes Dr Rajshri Roy, a NZ registered dietitian, who joins us as a lecturer in the Masters of Health Sciences in Nutrition and Dietetics programme.

She specialises in research, public health nutrition, and clinical dietetics. Her research interests are in the area of population nutrition and community dietetics, looking at food environment interventions and nutritional epidemiology in young adults.

Rajshri has recently been awarded a Food and Health Programme research grant to audit the University of Auckland food environment and survey on campus food purchasing behaviours, preferences, and opinions on food availability of University staff and students. She is passionate about food and nutrition and its relation to evidence-based holistic health.

Dr Juliette Cheyne has returned to the Physiology Department as a Research Fellow after six years in Amsterdam at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.

She received a Neurological Foundation Repatriation Scholarship and an Auckland Medical Foundation Project Grant to study the development of the auditory cortex in a mouse model of autism, together with Associate Professor Johanna Montgomery and Professor Peter Thorne.

Congratulations to Dr Francis Hunter from the Auckland Cancer Research Centre who managed to bag two awards within a fortnight. 

Francis was awarded the ‘Young Bioscientists of the year’ at the NZBIO Excellence Awards Dinner in Auckland in September and the ‘Keith & Meida Hepburn Young Scientist Award’ from the Cancer Society Auckland-Northland earlier this month.

Dr Susann Beier was this year’s recipient of the $35,000AUS personal stipend, announced at the annual meeting of Cardiovascular Society of Australia and New Zealand in Adelaide in August.

Susann's work bridges the gap between engineering and medicine by using sophisticated 3D-printing, big data and super-computing to identify early risk markers for coronary artery disease. These not only help prevention, but also improve stent treatment by introducing a novel patient-specific consideration framework.

Research Fellow Dr Fiona McBryde, at the University of Auckland has helped to identify a potential new way of treating high blood pressure, or hypertension by targeting aberrant nerve signals in the carotid bodies, which sit on the common carotid arteries on each side of the neck.

The study was led by Professor Julian Paton, Professor of Physiology at the University of Bristol, UK, who has held an honorary professorship at the University of Auckland since 2010.

The research study entitled ‘Purinergic receptors in the carotid body as a new drug target for controlling hypertension’, was published in the September 5th online edition of Nature Medicine, and involved an international research collaboration, in conjunction with Afferent Pharmaceuticals (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA).

Read the Article

Dr Nasim Mehrabi, one of our postdoctoral research fellows, has just had her doctoral research published in a top neuroscience journal “Neurobiology of Disease” in a paper titled ‘Symptom heterogeneity in Huntington’s disease correlates with neuronal degeneration in the cerebral cortex’.

Her research further supports and considerably expands our previous findings by showing that the pattern of neuronal loss in three cortical brain areas in Huntington’s disease corresponds to the predominant symptom type in a patient. Her paper has attracted international attention in the world wide “HD NEWS” (see link below) which features the top international research on Huntington’s disease.

Read the paper

The Synaptic Function Research Group is a team of scientists fascinated by the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how neurons work led by Associate Professor Johanna Montgomery in the Department of Physiology and Centre for Brain Research. Their research focusses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie the physiology of excitatory synapses in the central and peripheral nervous systems. 

Johanna's research team combines electrophysiology, behavioural and imaging techniques to investigate how changes in synapse function could underlie developmental disorders such as Autism, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington's Disease. Recently, research in this group has expanded to examine how neuronal, synapse and myocyte plasticity may contribute to normal and abnormal heart rhythm.

Scientists in The Synaptic Function Research Group are:

• Dr Chantelle Fourie
• Dr Yewon Jung
• Dr Kevin Lee
• Dr Annika Winbo
• Jesse Ashton
• Wojciech Ambroziak
• Yukti Vyas
• Dr Juliette Cheyne
• Dr Meagan Barclay

Research projects in progress in the lab are currently examining: (i) the role of zinc in reversing cellular and behavioural changes in Autism Spectrum Disorders (extending from our 2016 paper in Journal of Neuroscience), (ii) the function and plasticity of synapses in the little brains of the heart, (iii)  the cellular basis of long QT syndrome (in collaboration with Prof Jon Skinner, ADHB), (iv) the role of SAP97 in reversing pathological receptor localisation in Huntington’s Disease, and (v) the synaptic basis of sensory deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorders using in vivo patch clamping.