Federal grant opens the door on Indigenous health issues 

 
 

Menzies School of Health Research, a school within Charles Darwin University’s Institute of Advanced Studies, has been awarded $76,000 for training scholarships by the Australian Government.

The Australian Government last week allocated grants worth $60 million to researchers across Australia investigating a range of health conditions, including Indigenous health issues. The funding will enable the best and brightest of Australia’s health and medical researchers to continue their research at home.

The scholarships, part of several grant wins for Menzies that cover a range of research areas, will enable two researchers to investigate the incidence of gastroenteritis in Indigenous children and examine brain recovery of Indigenous people who had stopped petrol sniffing.

The Australian Government has encouraged Australia’s world class health researchers to continue working in Australia by quadrupling health and medical research funding since 1996.

A full list of Menzies School of Health Research grant recipients appear below:

  • Dr Rebecca Towers, Australian Training Fellowship for ATSI Health Research: Investigation of cardiac autoantigens identified by screening a cDNA library with acute rheumatic fever.
  • Dr Ngiare Brown, Training Scholarship for Indigenous Australian Health Research: Integrating human rights and public health to improve Aboriginal health outcomes.
  • Miss Kylie Dingwall, Training Scholarship for Indigenous Australian Health Research: The nature of brain function recovery following abstinence for petrol sniffing.
  • Dr Naor Bar-Zeev, Training Scholarship for Indigenous Australian Health Research: Vaccination strategies to reduce ear disease in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the Northern Territory.
  • Dr Thomas Snelling, Training Scholarship for Indigenous Australian Health Research: Rotavirus gastroenteritis in the Aboriginal population and the effect of immunization.
  • Dr Steven Tong, Medical Postgraduate Scholarship: Community-associated methicilin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus: epidemiology, emergence and treatment.
  • Dr Joshua Davis, Medical Postgraduate Scholarship: Endothelial function and adjuvant therapies in sepsis.

The full list of grant allocations can be found at: http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/funding/funded/outcomes/index.htm