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Three Academy Fellows have been elected to the fellowship of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (AAHMS) today.

They are part of a cohort of 28 top medical and health researchers elected by their peers in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the health and medical research landscape in Australia.

Professor Carola Vinuesa FAA FAHMS—an experimental immunologist, Professor Vinuesa has been contributing to the COVID-19 effort by ensuring Australia has sufficient testing capacity. She led a team to optimise testing platforms using saliva testing and robotics to increase testing throughput. Prior to the pandemic, her work has been instrumental in understanding how the human immune system produces a long-lasting antibody response to disease. She is the Head of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. More about Professor Vinuesa

Professor Naomi Wray FAA FAHMS—working at the interface of statistics, genetics and neurological disorders, Professor Wray studies complex genetic disease. She has a particular focus on psychiatric disorders and describes her work as a ‘dialogue’ between the development of new methods to analyse data and using mathematical models to describe and interpret that newly available information. Her theoretical work on the prediction of rates on genetic inbreeding has led to changes worldwide in agricultural selection programs. She holds joint appointments at the Institute for Molecular Biology and the Queensland Brain Institute within the University of Queensland. More about Professor Wray

Professor Susan Clark FAA FAHMS—a human cancer epigeneticist, Professor Clark is perhaps most known for her development of DNA methylation and histone modification sequencing technologies that help simplify epigenetic analysis. She has made extensive discoveries relating to DNA-methylation patterns in normal and cancer genomes that have led to commercialisation of new tests for early cancer detection. She is credited with initiating profound questions on the importance of epigenetics in disease and is the inaugural Head of the Genomics and Epigenetics Theme at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. More about Professor Clark

AAHMS President and Academy of Science Fellow, Laureate Professor Ingrid Scheffer, has highlighted that “health and medical science has never been more in the spotlight.”

“The diverse talents and expertise of these Fellows reflects the incredible breadth and depth of Australia’s world class health and medical research. It is this solid base of expertise that has equipped the country to address the pandemic so successfully.”

The Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences work closely on relevant issues and have co-led several Rapid Research Information Forum reports, providing responses to key questions about COVID-19 to politicians and policymakers.