Alex Hui, a 20/20 PhD student at The University of Waterloo’s Centre for Contact Lens Research (CCLR), was recently awarded a 2012 Endeavour Research Fellowship! As the Australian Government website details:

“The Endeavour Award is the Australian Government’s internationally-competitive, merit-based scholarship program providing opportunities for citizens of the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas to undertake study, research and professional development in Australia. “

In 2012 Alex will move to Australia for a six month period to study at Sydney’s Brien Holden Vision Institute (BHVI). Being awarded this fellowship is not only an honour, but an excellent opportunity for Alex to expand his knowledge of microbiological techniques. Alex sums up his hopes and expectations of the experience as follows:

“By going on this exchange program, the hope is that I will gain some experience in the areas that BHVI is proficient in, and be able to bring that knowledge back to the CCLR and the 20/20 network, while also spreading some knowledge to BHVI from my own experiences in Waterloo. BHVI is one of the leaders in the world in culturing, typing and identification of bacteria from contact lenses, cases, and solutions. As my work deals with antibiotic contact lenses, I will be able to learn and develop techniques to properly test my materials against bacteria in a clinically relevant way, and thus give [more] relevance to the experiments I have already been conducting. There is also the possibility that I will be able to work with some animal models, as they also have facilities for rats and rabbits, as well as the expertise of working with animals and contact lenses. The aim of all of this is to go from model experiments without organisms to experiments with organisms to see if our materials actually work as intended and suggested by our experiments.”

Alumni of the Endeavour Research Fellowship describe the experience as a great way to immerse themselves in a different culture, and an exceptional way of building a professional network. We hope Alex will receive all of these benefits also!

Alex remains very gracious, thanking Lyndon Jones, 20/20 investigator and Alex’s supervisor, and his new supervisor in Sydney, Mark Willcox.

Best wishes in Australia!

The Spring 2012 Annual Conference will be held on Wednesday April 4th and Thursday April 5th in Toronto, Ontario. The venue location will be annoced in coming weeks!  The conference will include a Board meeting, scientific talks, and a dinner.

All members of the network are invited to attend.

Laura Wells, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering at McMaster and former 20/20 PhD student, is the winner of the OCE Discovery 2011 Student Oral Presentation Competition.

She walked away with the $2,500 top prize for her presentation: “A Clearer Solution - Light Responsive Materials for Drug Delivery.” Fifteen university students from across Ontario were short listed for the competition.

The winning entry was selected by a panel of four judges that included: Steve Currie, vice president business services, Communitech; Toby Heaps, editor in chief, Corporate Knights; Lucy Keating, co-founder and partner, Commexus Inc.; and Rui Resendes, executive director, Green Centre Canada.

Glen Murray, Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation, sat in on the presentations.

Laura's five-minute presentation was based on her PhD thesis project, which was funded by 20/20 and which focused on the development of light responsive materials for drug delivery in the back-of-the-eye to potentially deliver drugs that treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD).  The work was supervised by Heather Sheardown, the Scientific Director of 20/20 and a professor in Chemical Engineering.

AMD is a leading cause of vision loss for people over the age of 50. Recent advances have seen drugs on the market that effectively block its progression but require monthly eye-injections, which increase their risk and lower their effectiveness.

“This competition helped enlighten me to the true potential of my thesis work and its potential commercial implications,” said Laura. “These light responsive materials will continue to be developed and the focus will shift into creating workable drug delivery platforms.”

The Student Oral Presentation Competition is designed to give students a chance to showcase research that may move science and engineering forward in an innovative way. It was open to all post-secondary students enrolled at an Ontario university or college during the period of April 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011.