Aleksandra Filipovska

Last updated

Aleksandra Filipovska FAHMS is a Professor, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and NHMRC Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, heading a research group at the Telethon Kids Institute. [1] [2] Specializing in biochemistry and molecular biology, she has made contributions to the understanding of human mitochondrial genetics in health and disease. [3]

Contents

Education and training

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science (with Honors, 1st Class) in 1998, Filipovska received her Ph.D. at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2002. [4] Between 2003-2005 she completed postdoctoral training as a New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Fellow at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, the United Kingdom, before relocating to Australia in 2006 as a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) Howard Florey Fellow. From 2009-2014 she was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow. She has been supported by an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship since 2014 as well as project grants from the NHMRC and ARC. [5] [6]

Research focus

Filipovska's research focuses on mitochondria, the 'powerhouses' that provide all human cells with energy. Dysfunction of mitochondria contributes to a variety of debilitating human diseases including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular and metabolic disorders, as well as cancer. During her graduate studies, Filipovska investigated how mutations in genes encoding for mitochondrial proteins can lead to disease, and developed new approaches to manipulate mitochondrial DNA replication and expression as potential therapies. [3] [6] During her postdoctoral work, she explored the use of compounds targeting mitochondria as a means to reduce oxidative stress in cells during aging and disease. [6] Since establishing her research group at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research and Telethon Kids Institute, Filipovska has continued to focus on molecular mechanisms that govern mitochondrial gene expression and protein synthesis and how defects in these processes can cause disease.

Awards and prizes

Filipovska has been awarded the:

She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2022. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit</span>

The MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit is a department of the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge, funded through a strategic partnership between the Medical Research Council and the University. It is located at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital / Cambridge Biomedical Campus site in Cambridge, England. The unit is concerned with the study of the mitochondrion, as this organelle has a varied and critical role in many aspects of eukaryotic metabolism and is implicated in many metabolic, degenerative, and age-related human diseases.

Vamsi K. Mootha is an Indian-born American physician-scientist and computational biologist. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute.

The Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research is given annually by Johnson & Johnson to honor the work of an active scientist in academia, industry or a scientific institute in the field of biomedical research. It was established in 2004 and perpetuates the memory of Paul Janssen, the founder of Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doug Hilton</span> Australian molecular biologist

Douglas "Doug" James Hilton is an Australian molecular biologist. He is the Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia and Head of the Department of Medical Biology at the University of Melbourne. His research has focused on cytokines, signal transduction pathways and the regulation of blood cell formation (hematopoiesis). Since 2014, Hilton has been the President of the Association of the Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI).

Emma Whitelaw is an eminent molecular biologist and NHMRC Australia Fellow at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and is among Australia's leading researchers of epigenetics. Whitelaw was the first to demonstrate epigenetic inheritance in mammals. She now currently works at La Trobe University in Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brendan Crabb</span> Australian scientist (born 1966)

Brendan Scott CrabbFASM is an Australian microbiologist, research scientist and director and chief executive officer of the Burnet Institute, based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas C. Wallace</span> American geneticist

Douglas Cecil Wallace is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. He pioneered the use of human mitochondrial DNA as a molecular marker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katharina Gaus</span> Australian immunologist (1972–2021)

Katharina Gaus was a German-Australian immunologist and molecular microscopist. She was an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and founding head of the Cellular Membrane Biology Lab, part of the Centre for Vascular Research at the University of New South Wales. Gaus used new super-resolution fluorescence microscopes to examine the plasma membrane within intact living cells, and study cell signalling at the level of single molecules to better understand how cells "make decisions". A key discovery of Gaus and her team was how T-cells decide to switch on the body's immune system to attack diseases. Her work is of importance to the development of drugs that can work with T-cells in support of the immune system.

Amanda Jane Fosang is a biomedical researcher who has pioneered arthritis research in Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josephine Forbes</span> Australian scientist

Josephine Forbes is an Australian scientist specialising in the study of glycation and diabetes. She has been studying diabetes since 1999 and has worked at Royal Children's Hospital, University of Melbourne and Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne Australia. Since 2012 she has led the Glycation and Diabetes team at Mater Research which is a world-class medical research institute based at South Brisbane, and part of the Mater Group. Josephine is program leader for Mater's Chronic Disease Biology and Care theme, building greater understanding of the biological basis of a broad range of chronic diseases, and developing preventative strategies and innovative treatments to improve patient outcomes. Josephine and her team focus on how advanced glycation contributes to the pathogenesis of diabetes and its complications such as kidney disease.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Visvader</span> Australian academic

Jane Visvader is a scientist specialising in breast cancer research who works for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. She is the joint head of the Breast Cancer Laboratory with Geoff Lindeman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Stow</span> Australian scientist

Jennifer Lea Stow is deputy director (research), NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and head of the Protein Trafficking and Inflammation laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, Australia. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University in Melbourne in 1982. As a Fogarty International Fellow, she completed postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine (US) in the Department of Cell Biology. She was then appointed to her first faculty position as an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Renal Unit, Departments of Medicine and Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. At the end of 1994 she returned to Australia as a Wellcome Trust Senior International Medical Research fellow at The University of Queensland where her work has continued. Stow sits on national and international peer review and scientific committees and advisory boards. She has served as head of IMB's Division of Molecular Cell Biology, and in 2008 she was appointed as deputy director (research).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melissa Little</span> Australian scientist and academic (born 1963)

Melissa Helen Little is an Australian scientist and academic, currently Theme Director of Cell Biology, heading up the Kidney Regeneration laboratory at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. She is also a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne, and Program Leader of Stem Cells Australia. In January 2022, she became CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine reNEW, an international stem cell research center based at University of Copenhagen, and a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Australia, and Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands.

Jenefer Blackwell is a Professor of Molecular Parasitology at the Telethon Kids Institute in the University of Western Australia. She studies host susceptibility and resistance to infectious diseases.

Naomi Ruth Wray is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics.

Alan Frederick Cowman AC, FRS, FAA, CorrFRSE, FAAHMS, FASP, FASM is an internationally acclaimed malaria researcher whose work specialises in researching the malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and the molecular mechanisms it uses to evade host responses and antimalarial drugs. He is currently Deputy Directory of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, and his laboratory continues to work on understanding how Plasmodium falciparum, infects humans and causes disease. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia in 2019 for his "eminent service to the biological sciences, notably to molecular parasitology, to medical research and scientific education, and as a mentor."

Kathryn "Kat" Elizabeth Holt is an Australian computational biologist specializing in infectious disease genomics. She is a professor at Monash University's Department of Infectious Diseases and a professor of Microbial Systems Genomics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Her current research focuses on investigating the evolution and dissemination of antimicrobial resistance. In 2015, Holt received the L'Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talent Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert K. Naviaux</span> American scientist

Robert K. Naviaux is an American physician-scientist who specializes in mitochondrial medicine and complex chronic disorders. He discovered the cause of Alpers syndrome, and was part of the team that reported the first mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutation to cause genetic forms of autism. Naviaux proposed the cell danger response (CDR) and hyperpurinergia hypothesis for complex disorders in 2014 and directed the first FDA-approved clinical trial to study the safety and efficacy of the antipurinergic drug suramin as a new treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Carla M. Koehler is an American biochemist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers mitochondria and the processes which import proteins to their appropriate locations in the organelles. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.

Professor Patrick Francis Chinnery, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci, is a neurologist, clinician scientist, and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow based in the Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit and the University of Cambridge, where he is also Professor of Neurology and Head of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

References

  1. Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research. "Professor Aleksandra Filipovska PhD" . Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  2. "Staff Profile: Prof Aleksandra Filipovska". University of Western Australia. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  3. 1 2 Rodgers, Anika. "Efforts to uncover Mitochondria's secrets increased". News: Health and Medicine. Science Network, Western Australia. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
  4. Bam Creative. "Professor Aleksandra Filipovska - Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research". www.perkins.org.au. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
  5. "Scientific and Medical Advisory Panel". Australian Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "The 2014 Merck Millipore Research Medal: Aleksandra Filipovska". Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Archived from the original on 14 August 2014. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  7. Dean, Tim (16 January 2013). "Life scientists recognised in Australian Academy of Science awards". Australian Life Scientist. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  8. Dr Aleksandra Filipovska. "2011 WA Tall Poppy Award Winners". Australian Institute of Science and Policy. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  9. Shanahan, Rachel (14 October 2022). "Professor Aleksandra Filipovska". Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Retrieved 23 October 2022.