Members

Professor Christina Mitchell, Chair
Professor Ross Coppell
Professor Edwina Cornish
Professor Peter Currie
Janet Kemp
Professor Nadia Rosenthal
Silvio Tiziani

Professor Christina Mitchell, Chair

Professor Christina Mitchell trained as a physician scientist specialising in clinical hematology. She received her medical training from Melbourne University and consultant training in Hematology at the Alfred Hospital Melbourne. Her advanced clinical training in Hematology included a Ph.D. characterizing the natural anticoagulants protein C and protein S. Her post-doctoral studies were undertaken in the field of intracellular signalling in Prof. Phil Majerus's laboratory at Washington University Medical School, St Louis USA. In 1991 she returned to Australia and became an independent investigator at the Department of Medicine, Box Hill Hospital. In 1999 she was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University.

Professor Ross Coppel

Ross graduated in medicine in 1976 later working as an intern and house officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Bethnal Green Hospital, London. In 1980 he returned to Australia and commenced a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Postgraduate Scholarship at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). On completion of his PhD, Ross worked as a research fellow at the WEHI in the fields of malaria and primary biliary cirrhosis. In 1994, Ross accepted a position with Monash University and took up a position as Professor of Microbiology within the Medicine Faculty and was Department Head until 1998.

Ross is a recipient of the Glaxo Award for Advanced Research in Infectious Diseases and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Fellow. He has authored or co-authored more than 420 scientific publications, including one book and multiple book chapters. This included a chapter in the definitive 1998 American Society of Microbiology volume on malaria. He serves on the editorial board of Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology, the top journal in the field of malaria and has reviewed for numerous journals including Nature, Science, Cell, J Cell Biol, Exp Parasitol and Acta Tropica. He is a named inventor on ten patents for inventions in malaria, primary biliary cirrhosis and novel antibiotics. In 1998, he became the first person to be appointed as an independent assessor to the Federal Court of Australia when he sat with the Justice in a major case involving a biotechnology patent.

He is an internationally recognised scientist for his work in the fields of malaria and primary biliary cirrhosis. He has received funding to support his research activities from both national and international agencies including the NHMRC, the ARC, the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the World Health Organization.

Ross was a member of the advisory committee that oversaw bioinformatics of the malaria genome project and he administered the malaria sequence database for the World Health Organization (WHO). He was a founder of the PlasmoDB consortium, a project to develop an organism-specific database that simplifies the analysis and exploitation of genomic sequence data by biologists.

Ross is currently Deputy Dean and Director of Research of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University and his laboratory the Coppel Lab is involved in research into malaria and tuberculosis infection. In November 2000, Ross and colleagues in the Faculties of Medicine and Information Technology, along with Agriculture Victoria (Plant Biotechnology Centre) and CSIRO Division of Mathematical and Information Sciences established the Victorian Bioinformatics Consortium of which he remains the Director.

Professor Edwina Cornish

Edwina Cornish was appointed to the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Monash University in February 2004.
She was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) and concurrently Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Adelaide.
Professor Cornish has a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Melbourne. She played a key role in building one of Australia 's first biotechnology companies, Florigene Limited. Under her leadership the company developed and successfully commercialised the world's first genetically modified flowers. She has been a member of the Board of the Australian Research Council and the South Australian Premier's Science and Research Council, and has served on the Prime Minister's Science and Engineering Council and the Victorian Government Science and Engineering Technology Taskforce. Professor Cornish is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Professor Peter Currie

Peter D. Currie received his Ph.D. in Drosophila genetics from Syracuse University, New York, USA. He undertook postdoctoral training in zebrafish development at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in London, UK. He has worked as an independent laboratory head at the UK Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, UK, and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, where he headed a research programme focused on skeletal muscle development and regeneration.  His work is centre on understanding how the small fresh water zebrafish is able to build and regenerate both skeletal and cardiac muscle. He has recently been appointed deputy director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a recipient of a European Molecular Biology Organization Young Investigators Award and a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship, and currently is a senior research fellow with the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia.

Janet Kemp

Janet Kemp's relationship with Monash dates back to her student days at the Clayton campus, where she undertook first a degree and then a masters course in economics. After a period in the private sector, she continued her career as a tutor in the Monash Department of Economics.

From the mid 1980s, Janet worked in State Government, including five years spent in a role as Director of the Financial Management Branch for what was then the Victorian Department of Finance. She returned to Monash in 1995 to work as the business and resources manager for the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development (now MIMR).

Janet joined the Faculty management team in the role of Resource Manger in 1998, and became Manager of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Service in 2002, a role in which she looked after all aspects of the Faculty's administration.

In her current role, Janet is responsible for the Faculty's operating budget, including the distribution of Commonwealth funding to the Faculty's ten schools. She also oversees senior academic appointments.

Professor Nadia Rosenthal

PhD 1981, Harvard Medical School, USA.
Postdoctoral research at the National Cancer Institute, USA.
Assistant Professor, Boston University Medical Center, USA.
Associate Professor, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA.
Head of EMBL Monterotondo Outstation, Rome, Italy
Chair in Cardiovascular Science, Imperial College London
Founding Director,Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University
Scientific Head, EMBL Australia

Born in the US, Professor Nadia Rosenthal obtained her PhD in 1981 from Harvard Medical School and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at NIH, then directed a biomedical research laboratory at Harvard Medical School, and served for a decade at the New England Journal of Medicine as editor of the Molecular Medicine series. In 2001 she moved to Rome to head the EMBL Mouse Biology Unit, and holds a Professorship of Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College London. She is an EMBO member, with numerous awards and honors including the Ferrari-Soave Prize in Cell Biology and Doctors Honoris Causa from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and the University of Amsterdam. She spearheaded the election of Australia to EMBL as its first Associate Member, and in 2008 she founded the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, which serves as Headquarters for the EMBL Australia Partner Laboratory Network. She is an NH&MRC Australia Fellow.

Professor Rosenthal’s research focuses on muscle and cardiac developmental genetics and the role of growth factors and stem cells in tissue regeneration, with over 100 primary research articles and prominent reviews in high impact international journals, including two stem cell reviews for Scientific American.  She has attracted sponsored research funding from major pharmaceutical companies including Amgen, Genzyme and Novartis for her translational studies in stem cell and regenerative medicine.  

Silvio Tiziani

Silvio is the Chief Operating Officer of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute.  A member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and the Institute of Management (AIM), Silvio has extensive experience in financial analysis and budget management, business development, strategic planning and corporate governance along with the interpersonal skills to effectively lead staff.