ELECTRICAL STIMULATION ON ORGANIC CONDUCTORS
With
Distinguished Professor Gordon Wallace AO,
Executive Research Director
Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI)
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia | November 2025
Professor Gordon Wallace AO is the Founder and Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) at the University of Wollongong and Founding Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) Materials Node. He was previously the Executive Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).
He was awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship in Nanobionics in 2011, appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his commitment to research collaboration and innovation in 2017, elected as a Fellow, Royal Society of NSW in 2017, and appointed to Prime Ministers Knowledge Nation 100 in 2015. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2022.
Over his career, Professor Wallace has attracted over $100M in competitive funding and his team was awarded an ARC Centre ($7.3M over 5 years) in 2003, which was subsequently upgraded in 2005 to an ARC Centre of Excellence ($14M over 5 years). A 3-year extension ($7.5M) of this Centre was awarded in 2010.
In 2014 he led a team successful in attracting a further 7 years ($25M) funding to ACES. This core funding has been supplemented by an ARC Federation Fellowship and Laureate Fellowship, ARC and NHMRC project grants, CRC projects (CRC Polymer a,CRC Hearing and Marine Bioproducts CRC), funding from the Defence Advanced Research Program Agency (USA), CSIRO, DSTO, the NSW Government and recently MTP Connect and ARENA.
In 2009, he was instrumental in attracting $50M in Federal Government funding to establish a Materials Processing and Device Fabrication Facility at UOW. To date, he is the Chief Scientist on the ($35M) BIENCO project and belongs on the Executive Committee Board alongside BIENCO CEO Danielle Fisher and Project Lead Gerard Sutton.
Since 2023, Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) has also been a crucial member of BIENCO, a world-first consortium of clinical practitioners, researchers and bioengineers addressing the global challenge of corneal blindness. He has published in excess of 1,200 refereed journal publications that have attracted more than 72,000 citations with an H-index of 123 (Scopus).He is named as a co-inventor on more than 60 patents. He is the lead author on three monographs entitled “Organic Bionics” (Wiley- VCH 2012), “Intelligent Polymer Systems” and “3D Bioprinting: Printing Parts for Bodies” (2014) and has also authored an additional 38 book chapters.
Source: Supplied
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0381-7273
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Clinical guidelines for diagnostics and early intervention in Primary Aldosteronism
Primary Aldosteronism (PA), or Conn Syndrome, is the most commonly under-diagnosed cause of high blood pressure affecting millions of people. Associate Professor Jun Yang’s goal is to facilitate the diagnosis of every case of PA and make treatment widely available to all communities including the disadvantaged.
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Stem cells used for age-related macular degeneration
Dr. Jenna Hall is a passionate and accomplished biologist with expertise in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) culture, disease modelling, and high-throughput automated systems. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, where her research focused on using iPSC-derived retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells to study age-related macular degeneration. Dr Hall’s technical skillset spans manual and automated cell reprogramming and differentiation, quantitative microscopy-based phenotyping, and large scale -omics analysis.
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DNA repair on the Fanconi anaemia pathway
Associate Professor Wayne Crismani is an internationally recognised expert in DNA repair, with a particular focus on Fanconi anaemia (FA)—a cancer-predisposition and bone marrow failure syndrome marked by extreme sensitivity to DNA damage. Based at St Vincent’s Institute in Melbourne, he leads a research program dedicated to understanding the genetic, cellular, and reproductive consequences of FA. He is currently supported by a Victorian Cancer Agency Mid-Career Fellowship and funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
