PhD candidate Emma Milanese is supported by the Roger Rasheed Sports Foundation to improve quality of life through sports, while other successes include a new animal house for CSE and an exceptional PhD candidate recognised for her work.
Improving quality of life through sports
Flinders University PhD candidate Emma Milanese will benefit from having the Roger Rasheed Sports Foundation help her to find out how sport can help improve the quality of life for children in one of South Australia’s most socially disadvantaged areas.
The Morton Road project in Christie Downs – with its new oval, skate park, tennis courts and accompanying programs – will be at the forefront of Emma’s research, which is funded and implemented equally by the Roger Rasheed Sports Foundation, Flinders University and the state government’s Office for Recreation, Sport and Racing.
“If we look at how to keep kids off the street, it reduces crime rates and keeps kids in school. This is going to have an overall long lasting effect on their health,” says Emma. “This needs to be done with this project. It’s about how it affects the economy and rest of our society. Equal opportunity is at the forefront of what we do.”
Emma’s PhD will discover and measure how first-rate sporting facilities and opportunities can lift the lives of children and adults living in impoverished areas – being the first research of its type in Australia.
Excellence awarded by Children’s Research Foundation
Flinders PhD candidate Demi Georgiou has received a 2022 Healthy Development Adelaide and Channel 7 Children’s Research Foundation PhD Excellence Award – marking 15 years that the foundation has helped to foster research excellence and career development in South Australia. As part of the 11th cohort of successful award winners, she will receive $5,000 per annum for three years to augment her scholarship.
Demi, a PhD candidate within Medical Biochemistry, College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University, was awarded for her research project ‘Elucidating the biological importance of Pregnancy Zone Protein (PZP)’ , which will provide much needed insight to the functions of PZP, a major pregnancy-associated protein, and increase understanding about the role of damaged proteins in Preeclampsia, which is a leading cause of pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality.
“This award will support me in my research and the knowledge gained from my project has the potential to be used as a foundation for developing novel therapeutic strategies for preeclampsia,” says Demi.
2023 Children’s Research Foundation grant research applications are now open and can be submitted through this link by 28 March: https://crf.org.au/grant-focus-and-aims/
CSE opens its new animal house
Flinders University’s new animal house (pictured right), in the College of Science and Engineering, will help redefine research and education of an astounding array of animals. The state-of-the-art facility is the most diverse research hub in the state for biodiversity and conservation, and its unique design allows for a flexible and adaptable range of applications, opening up fresh opportunities for study and research.
The centre’s aqua rooms will house rainbowfish and clownfish, amongst others, while the terrestrial room will host many reptiles, including sleepy lizards, tawny dragons, pygmy bluetongues and gidgee skinks. The facility will also play a pivotal role in research and husbandry of birds of prey, platypus and Port Jackson sharks. For more information about the new animal house, click onto the STEM at Flinders blog post: https://blogs.flinders.edu.au/stem/2022/02/14/new-animal-house-set-to-redefine-research-and-education/