Research Group Heads receive academic promotions to Associate Professor

Two Hudson Institute Group Heads, Megan Wallace and Rebecca Lim, were recently awarded academic promotions to Associate Professor at Monash University.

Associate Professor Megan Wallace

Associate Professor Megan Wallace

A/Prof Wallace is the Director of Medical Student Research for the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences and is responsible for: convening the BMedSc(Hons) degree, overseeing the MBBS-PhD Pathway and developing and implementing a new 12 credit-point Unit for 500 medical students/year across Australia and Malaysia in the new MD degree.

As such, she plays a key role in driving the vital intersection between teaching and the research in the Faculty, training and mentoring junior clinician scientists, promoting evidence-based medicine, and increasing the base of research-active clinicians in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

A/Prof Wallace is also a senior lecturer in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health. In that role, she is developing a suite of short courses for health professionals as she convenes a third-year undergraduate unit on a Fetal and Neonatal Development that has been ranked as Outstanding (SETU > 4.7) every year for the past five years. Her personal SETU scores place her in the top five per cent of educators in the FMNHS.

She also leads the Lung Development research group in The Ritchie Centre, Hudson Institute. Her research seeks to determine the mechanisms that regulate normal and abnormal lung development around the time of birth, understanding the transition at birth and identifying resuscitation strategies that reduce lung injury at birth. In the past five years, she has been on a CI on >$2.7 million from NHMRC, ARC, Industry and small grants and $2.5 million worth of synchrotron beam time.

Associate Professor Rebecca Lim

Associate Professor Rebecca Lim

A/Prof Rebecca Lim leads the Amnion Cell Biology research group at The Ritchie Centre, Hudson Institute and is a Chief Investigator on two current NHMRC project grants. She is also an investigator on three outgoing clinical trials at Monash Health, in neonatal lung injury, chronic liver disease and acute adult stroke.

The core research of A/Prof Lim’s laboratory is in the area of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. Her research team is uncovering the regenerative potential of amnion derived stem-like cells while concurrently pursuing clinical translation of her findings. A/Prof Lim’s team has taken their research from the discovery phase to clinical testing including developing protocols for cell manufacturing and clinical release, and commercialisation of cell-free regenerative medicine.