8 June 2010

Victorian medical researcher Dr Julia Archbold has been using the MX1 beamline at the Australian Synchrotron to solve the structures of some key proteins that are helping to provide new insights into organ transplant rejection.

She recently gained her PhD in structural immunology under the supervision of Professor Jamie Rossjohn at Monash University.

Mr Brumby presented Dr Archbold and other winners with awards and prize money at a ceremony at Government House in Melbourne on 7 June 2010. The awards are presented annually to outstanding Victorian postgraduate health or medical research scholars as an initiative of the Victorian Government and the Australian Society for Medical Research.

Mr Brumby also announced further funding of $800,000 towards the new MASSIVE high performance computing facility at the Australian Synchrotron and Monash University.

“The Multi-modal Australian Sciences Imaging and Visualisation Environment (or MASSIVE) is the first facility of its kind in Australia, bringing together two high performance computers at the Australian Synchrotron.

“MASSIVE will be a centre of excellence for computational imaging and visualisation and offer researchers from a range of fields — including biomedicine, astronomy, engineering, geoscience and climate studies — unparalleled capacities to construct and view visualisations of the objects of their investigations. 

“The facility will enable scientists to create, view and analyse high-resolution scientific images and 3D-models previously too large to visualise.”