Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Medicine

Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series
Event date :
Thursday, August 16, 2018 - 15:30 to 17:00
Event Type :
Lecture
Categories
Location :
Council Chamber, The Chancellery, UNSW Kensington
Open to :
Public
Number of seats available :
100
Booking deadline: 
Contact for bookings
https://www.events.unsw.edu.au/event/2018-professorial-inaugural-lecture-series-medicine
Contact for inquiries
university.events@unsw.edu.au

You're invited to the third Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Medicine

The 2018 UNSW Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series is a wonderful chance for staff and students to celebrate the careers and achievements of our newly promoted and recruited professors. Our speakers will share their specialist knowledge and provide insights into ‘what’ and ‘who’ influenced their lives and careers.

Speakers

Professor Merlin Crossley Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic
Professor Danny Eckert
Professor Jane Butler 
Professor Gary Velan Senior Vice Dean (Education) and Head of Teaching in Pathology

Date: Thursday 16th August
Timings: Talks 3.30 - 5pm, followed by a cocktail reception 5 - 6pm 

Please register HERE (link is external)or follow the link below.

Professor Danny Eckert

Sleep, the next frontier in medicine and the 3rd pillar of health: New approaches to understanding and treating sleep-related breathing disorders

Inadequate or disrupted sleep due to a medical condition or sleep disorder adversely affects every organ in the body. 4/10 Australians have inadequate sleep. Last year, inadequate sleep cost the Australian community $66 billion. Obstructive sleep apnoea is the most common sleep-related breathing disorder (affects > 1 million Australians). The first-line therapy (continuous positive airway pressure: CPAP) developed here in Australia is highly efficacious. However, it is often poorly tolerated (~50% failure rate). This lecture will highlight new discoveries into why people get sleep apnoea and how this work is being used to develop much-needed new targeted therapies.

Professor Danny Eckert trained in sleep and respiratory physiology at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health where he completed his PhD in 2006. He then spent 5.5y at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School where he was an Assistant Professor. He is currently a NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Principal Research Scientist at NeuRA where he heads the clinical sleep research program. His research focuses on identification of the causes of sleep apnoea and related breathing disorders and development of tailored therapies using novel respiratory phenotyping techniques. He is a strong advocate for the importance of sleep health. 

Professor Jane Butler

Breathing is not just in the lung 

Breathing muscles are important skeletal muscles essential for life, yet in comparison to limb muscles relatively little is known about how they are controlled by the brain and spinal cord. This lecture will demonstrate some of the recent discoveries about the way breathing muscles are controlled in health and disease and highlight a new method to improve respiratory function after spinal cord injury. 

Professor Jane Butler (PhD) graduated in 1999 from UNSW, worked at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, University of Miami supported by a NHMRC post-doctoral fellowship, and has returned to Australia in 2002 to continue her research at NeuRA. She has a broad interest in the control of human motoneurones in health on disease with a focus on the control of respiration. Current studies include investigation of the behaviour of single motor units in respiratory muscles and respiratory neural control during normal breathing and in patients with respiratory disorders such as obstructive sleep apnoea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and methods to improve respiratory function and health after spinal cord injury. She also studies the changes in the motor pathway that occur during normal movement and fatigue. 

For those who cannot make it in person, listen online here(link is external).

Contact us: university.events@unsw.edu.au 

Cost
free

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