Griffith University postdoctoral researcher, Dr Louisa Windus has been awarded 3rd prize in the prestigious Eureka Prize by the Australian Museum.
The Australian Museum Eureka Prizes were announced in Sydney on 4 September in the presence of 700 science, government, cultural and media leaders.
Dr Windus received the award for the image ‘Chemokine receptor expression on prostate cancer cells in 3D culture’.
A postdoctoral researcher in the discovery biology lab at Griffith University’s Eskitis Institute, Dr Windus’ research involves looking into the proteins that affect the rate of development in prostate cancer.
Dr Windus said she was delighted to have been a finalist and to receive such a prestigious award.
“It is a real honour to receive the Eureka prize for my image amongst such a world-class field of scientific photographers.” Dr Windus said.
“The task of capturing these images is quite laborious to set up. It can take 10 days to culture the cells before treating them specifically and tagging them with antibodies.”
“It then takes another 9 hours to capture the image using lasers as the light source to create up 180 planes which can be acquired by confocal microscopy to reconstruct the 3D image.”
Dr Windus’ research continues to focus on cellular interactions and observing the way that both normal and abnormal cells react.
“We are interested in trying to find the proteins that are involved in metastasis, the spread of a cancer from one organ to another, in particular cancer cells that sit inside the bone.”
Presented annually by the Australian Museum, the Eureka Prizes reward excellence in 17 fields including research & innovation, leadership & commercialisation, school science and science journalism & communication.
Find out more about Dr Louisa Windus’ research –http://youtu.be/CikYetph5J8