$6m to fund unique Physical Biosciences program

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 1  14 April - 12 May 2008 ]

By Christina Buckridge

A $6m cross-disciplinary program in the Physical Biosciences - unique to Australia – is being developed by the University of Melbourne.

Physical Biosciences is a key collaborative research area for the University.

The Physical Biosciences program – based in the School of Physics – will build on existing synergies between the University’s world-renowned biomedical and bioscience research and the capabilities of the Australian Synchrotron as a research tool of international standard.

The University has allocated $3.5m and the Baker Foundation $2.5m over five years to ­establish the Thomas Baker Professor of Bio-sciences to lead the new program.

The School of Physics is now negotiating for an outstanding academic with a proven track record in highly-cited interdisciplinary research who will bring together key researchers from different disciplines and forge new directions that bridge and extend the biological sciences with the quantitative strengths of the physical sciences.

Head of the School of Physics, Professor David Jamieson, says this approach is strongly characteristic of the ‘breakthrough research’ of today. “Just as the discovery of DNA required the collaboration of physicists, modern biological research also requires physics, chemistry, mathematics and advanced computer technology if it is to progress,” he says.

Professor Jamieson says Mel-bourne’s Physical Biosciences program will bring physics strengths to bear on bioscience problems, for even greater results. It will help students – both secondary and tertiary, from both biological and physical sciences – become more aware of the importance of the cross-disciplinary approach to biological problems.

Biomedical/bioscience research and physics are clear individual strengths of the University. For instance, a recent Thomson Scientific report puts the University of Melbourne in the ‘Top 3’ in Australia in both citations and impact in five fields – neurosciences, physics, microbiology, pharmacology and psychology/psychiatry.

Professor Jamieson says the School of Physics – pre-eminent among its peers in Australia – is in an excellent position to lead this program.

“Outstanding in frontier fundamental physics, it is a leader in a range of research areas which can provide great utility to the community, such as X-ray and visible optics, materials analysis, computational sciences, high precision microscopy and new quantum devices and quantum computing,” he says.