Professor Peter Koopman, from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, has been named as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow today at a ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra. UQ garnered three Federation Fellows out of the 20 announced.

Two current UQ Federation Fellows, Professor Gerard Milburn and Professor John Quiggin, have won second Federation Fellowships in recognition of their exceptional research in the fields of quantum physics (Milburn) and economic risk modelling (Quiggin).

Federation Fellows are considered to be world-leaders in their chosen fields of research and the program is aimed at attracting some of the world's best research talent as well as offering opportunities for top Australian researchers to continue their work here.

Professor Koopman said his research was looking to develop and use new and vastly more efficient ways of identifying which of our 30,000 genes are important for embryonic development.

What we are trying to do is reveal their specific function and identify control mechanisms that can go awry to cause birth defects, Professor Koopman said.

Professor Koopman's research will suggest new ways to diagnose and deal with these conditions, and will be applicable to: stem cell technologies; tissue regeneration; cancer biology; conservation; pest management; and livestock breeding.

Professor Koopman is world-renowned in the field of developmental biology, and was part of the team that discovered the gene that determines sex in mammals, which has been called one of the most important biological discoveries of the 20th Century.

Professor Milburn, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computer Technology at UQ, is researching quantum nanoscience to develop design principles, based on quantum theory, for new nano-scale devices, particularly quantum electromechanical systems (QEMS) with applications to electronics, nano-optics, metrology an
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Contact: Andrew Dunne
communications@uq.edu.au
61-733-652-802
Research Australia
22-May-2007