Science Colloquium 2024 - Medicine with Unimaginable Promise

Our annual Science Colloquium this year be held on Wednesday 9 October at the LTC Function Room (Caulfield Campus). This year’s theme is “Medicine with unimaginable promise".

The ability to regenerate damaged body parts and create self-learning neural networks using living nerve tissue and AI may once have seemed like a distant dream. However, this dream is rapidly becoming a reality as Australian researchers continue to push the boundaries of scientific exploration.

At our 2024 Science Colloquium, we are honoured to welcome two distinguished local researchers, Prof. Edwina McGlinn and Prof. Adeel Razi, who will present their cutting-edge research in regenerative medicine and the development of neural networks formed by living nerve cells and trained by AI.

Join us for a thought-provoking session that will explore the exciting possibilities and significant challenges of a future where medicine and science merge in unprecedented ways. This event will take you to the very edge of scientific discovery, offering a glimpse into what is possible in a world that fully embraces the potential of scientific knowledge.

We invite all those intrigued by these ground breaking fields to attend. The evening will feature a buffet dinner and will run from 6:00pm to 9:00pm at the LTC Caulfield Campus on Wednesday, 9 October.

We look forward to reconnecting with familiar faces, making new acquaintances, and engaging in stimulating discussions throughout the night.

Tickets are $82 per person and each campus are providing 50 free places for the first 50 Caulfield Grammar School students who book.

PROFESSOR EDWINA McGLINN

Edwina completed her PhD in developmental and molecular biology at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. This work led her to join the laboratory of Professor Clifford Tabin, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, working to understand how 3-dimensional coordination of limb growth occurs in the developing embryo. Edwina was recruited to Monash University, Melbourne as the first EMBL-Australia Group Leader, based at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI). Edwina was recently promoted to Professor and serves as the Head of Research Excellence and Mentorship at ARMI. Edwina has a strong interest in the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in science, establishing the first ARMI EDI Committee, current Chair of the Faculty’s EDI committee, and recently joining Monash’s cross-faculty EDI committee that oversees all EDI initiatives across the University.

Research Vision

Edwina’s lab works to understand how early cells of the body, with their broad-ranging potential, become specified to form complex organ structures. By understanding how the body generates tissues and organs in the first place, we will apply this knowledge to advance cell based regenerative medicine strategies.

PROFESSOR ADEEL RAZI

Adeel Razi is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, at the Monash University, Australia where he is the Director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. He is a computational neuroscientist who uses both mathematical and experimental methods for his investigations. He leads a highly cross-disciplinary laboratory doing research combining engineering, physics, and machine-learning approaches to answer questions that are motivated by and grounded in neurobiology. This endeavour will enable him to go beyond the traditional boundaries in order to understand how the brain works. His research has implications for building new neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence systems, treatment of brain diseases and development of new neuro-technologies. His work has been published in journals such as Neuron, Nature Communications, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been featured in BBC, CNN, Nature, The Economist, The Guardians, The New Yorker, and The Age. He joined Monash after finishing his postdoctoral studies (2012-2018) at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL, UK.

In 2022 a Melbourne-led team had, for the first time, shown that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case the simple tennis-like computer game, Pong. The results of the study are published in the journal Neuron.

“We have shown we can interact with living biological neurons in such a way that compels them to modify their activity, leading to something that resembles intelligence,” says lead author Dr Brett Kagan.