Spotlight on Growing Ideas & Growing Careers Event
The Growing Ideas & Growing Careers event featured a keynote presentation entitled “The Distracted Academic” by Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University. Professor Mewburn addressed the challenges academics face in maintaining focus amidst many competing demands for time and attention. She also highlighted practical strategies for managing workload using Artificial Intelligence tools.
Research presentations covered fields as diverse as improving understanding of modifiable breast cancer risk factors (Dr Brook Nickel, University of Sydney School of Public Health), to AI-based motion tracking to target radiation therapy (Dr Chandrima Sengupta, Image X Institute, University of Sydney) and computation methods for analysis of multi-omic data (Dr Simon Cai, The Children’s Medical Research Institute).
Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, Dr Tiffany Li, described her work to optimise clinical translation of new tools for assessing cancer patients for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. Dr Li said her Sydney Cancer Partners PhD scholarship and travel support helped her to establish a collaborative network to explore scale-up and visit national and international conferences after the challenges of the COVID-19 lockdown period.