Flinders PhD student Lisa Alcock from the Chalker Research Lab has confirmed her status as a young high flier in chemistry by winning a 2018 Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship.

She is one of only 24 Australians to be awarded this prestigious opportunity.

This national scholarship provides support for a year of research overseas, which Lisa will spend at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry under the supervision of Dr Gonçalo Bernardes.

At Cambridge, Lisa’s research will focus on new chemical techniques to understand the cellular consequences of oxidative stress.

One of her goals is to map a specific cancer biomarker formed on proteins during oxidative stress: cysteine sulfenic acid.

For this research, Lisa will use a new chemical probe she invented as part of her PhD research at Flinders University in the laboratories of co-supervisors Dr Justin Chalker and Associated Professor Michael Perkins (see: Norbornene probes for the study of cysteine oxidation).

“This will be a very important part of continuing our current collaborative work with Flinders University on probing cysteine oxidation chemistry and biology,” says Dr Bernardes.

“Lisa’s research will also strengthen the current collaboration between the Chalker and Bernardes laboratories at Flinders and Cambridge.”

This significant international recognition follows Lisa’s acceptance into the 2017 SciFinder Future Leaders program in the United States, when she was one of 25 outstanding PhD students from around the world selected to attend SciFinder research events in Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, DC, during August (see: Chemistry PhD joins US future leaders class).

Lisa has also recently been nominated by the Australian Academy of Science as one of the six Australian graduate students to participate in the 10th HOPE Meeting being organised by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and to be held in Tokyo from 11-15 March 2018.