Dr Katie Ayers

Treasurer

Co-Group Leader / Senior Research Fellow, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute; email: [email protected]

Professor Clare Parish is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and head of the Stem Cells and Neural Development laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health. She obtained her PhD in 2002 (Monash) and subsequently spent 5 years at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) researching stem cell-based therapies for Parkinson’s disease. She returned to Australia in 2007 to establish her own research group. Since establishing her independence, she has held ongoing national and international grant funding and fellowship support. As an index of her success she has >90 publications (with >50% related to stem cell research), 3 patents and has had numerous national and international speaking invitation. She serves on 5 editorial boards, peer reviews for >25 journals, and sits on many grant review panels and external reviews. Of relevance Parish is an Stem Cells Australia Associate Investigator.

Professor Parish has a broad research interest relating to disease modeling and repairing the injured brain. Her research team places a strong emphasis on understanding neural development, with the idea that repairing the injured brain will require recapitulation of many of these early events. Consequently there are a number of major research themes running within the laboratory, including: understanding the neural development; directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells; molecular mechanisms underlying axonal targeting and synaptogenesis and improving cell-replacement therapy for neural injuries.