APG Research Symposium 2026
Description
Join us for our Annual Research Symposium (formally the APG Awards Fest), a dynamic gathering of scientists and innovators dedicated to exploring the latest advancements across a wide range of disciplines. This one-day event will feature keynote presentations by A/Prof Susan Woods and A/Prof Yu Heng Lau, as well as presentations and poster sessions showcasing cutting-edge research from our students and ECRs.
Whether you're a student, ECR, or academic, this symposium offers a unique opportunity to engage with current scientific challenges, foster interdisciplinary collaborations, and contribute to impactful discussions on the future of research and innovation.
Event highlights:
Keynote presentations by leading experts in their fields
Oral presentations from students and ECRs
Interactive poster sessions and networking breaks
Awards to be won include: Best Student Talk, Best ECR talk*, Best Posters (2x), and People's Choice Award
*Best ECR Talk will win REGISTRATION and GUARANTEED TALK at this year's ComBio Conference!!!
📅 Date: 2nd July 2026 (Thursday)
📍 Location: AHMS, Adelaide University, West End, North Terrace
Keynote Speakers
A/Prof Susan Woods
Title: Transforming Gut Cancer Detection And Treatment Research in Susan’s group aims to improve early detection methods for gut cancers, so that they may be identified at a point when most can be cured. This involves the application of synthetic biology approaches to engineer bacteria to act as disease detectors in the gut. The team is also developing engineered bacteria to deliver treatments directly to tumours, to reduce unwanted side-effects of treatment. Recent projects also investigate how the bacterial community in our gut is changed in cancer, and the role this plays in promoting this disease.
A/Prof Yu Heng Lau
Title: Double Or Nothing: Lessons Learned When Evolving A Multimeric Cage-Forming Protein Directed evolution (DE) is a powerful technique for exploring protein sequence space, where new sequences with desirable traits can be selected for if they have superior fitness in an appropriately designed experiment. Yu Heng's group became interested in DE as part of their program to engineer cage-forming proteins (encapsulins) as organelles for carbon fixation. Encapsulins form icosahedral multimeric cages that typically have small pores at their vertices. As these pores can bottleneck the flow of enzyme substrates and products in and out of the cages, they sought to engineer encapsulins with larger pores by DE. A/Prof Yu Heng Lau will discuss how DE didn’t work as planned. The key to unlocking a reliable DE workflow was to use gene duplication, a well-known phenomenon in evolutionary biology that had somehow never been used in the context of DE, which expands the accessible fitness landscape of sequence variants for multimeric proteins.
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity