RESEARCHER PROFILE (Filmed April 2024)
Associate Professor Jelena Rnjak-Kovacina
Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering
UNSW Sydney, Australia
Dr Jelena Rnjak-Kovacina is a Scientia Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow leading a multidisciplinary group at the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, UNSW Sydney in Australia.
She completed her doctoral degree in Anthony Weiss’ lab at the University of Sydney and her postdoctoral training in David Kaplan’s group at Tufts University in Boston. She joined UNSW in 2014 where her research has been supported by funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Heart Foundation, the National Health & Medical Research Council, and NSW Health. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including most recently, the NSW Ministerial Award for Rising Stars in Cardiovascular Research and the Early Career Researcher of the Year (Physical Sciences) in the NSW Premier’s Prizes for Science & Engineering.
Her research interests are at the interface of biology and engineering, focusing on the development of biomimetic materials that direct cellular interactions for enhanced vascularisation and for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. In particular, she develops novel silk-based biomaterials and investigates how biomaterial properties translate to biological outcomes.
She is actively involved in the Australasian MedTech sector, including as Vice President of the Australasian Society for Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering (ASBTE), board member of the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance (ACvA) Bioengineering flagship, Fellow of the Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society, and through editorial roles for multiple journals. She is passionate about research training and communication.
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Health and economic burden of interstitial lung diseases
Dr Cox’s main research interests focus on respiratory diseases and primarily on the economic burden and economic evaluation of interventions and treatments for their management. She earned her PhD from the University of Tasmania where her doctoral research examined the health and economic burden of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in Australia, one component of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence for Pulmonary Fibrosis, a national project implemented alongside the Australian IPF Registry and the Lung Foundation Australia. This research provided the first epidemiological profile and first costing estimates of the economic burden of the disease in Australia, providing essential evidence for health service reimbursement policies.
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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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CASE STUDY Large scale genetic study finds link between Irritable Bowel Syndrome & cardiovascular system
Research published April 2024 in the journal Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology sheds light on disease mechanisms common to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and cardiovascular diseases (CVD).
