University Academic Award winners

Research excellence

Research academics from the Australian Institute of Health Innovation secured two highly competitive category wins during the Macquarie University Academic Awards announced on 30 November 2021.

The Macquarie University Academic Awards are held biennially to recognise exceptional contributions and talent in teaching and research.

Early Career Researcher of the Year

Dr Sidong Liu was named Early Career Researcher of the Year in the STEMM category for his invaluable work in artificial intelligence in healthcare. Dr Liu is a NHMRC Early Career Fellow at the Department of Clinical Medicine and Australian Institute of Health Innovation. Through his research, Dr Liu aims to deliver advanced information technologies into the medical research field.

Recently Dr Liu has published papers on the use of AI and machine learning to identify potential brain tumours and glaucoma and to assess the severity of COVID-19 in patients.

Excellence in Research – Five Future-shaping Research Priorities

The NHMRC Partnership Centre for Health System Sustainability (PCHSS) was named winner: Excellence in Research – Five Future-shaping Research Priorities: Healthy People. The PCHSS’s winning research was led by Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, Professor Enrico Coiera, Professor Johanna Westbrook, Associate Professor Yvonne Zurynski and Professor Andrew Georgiou.

These five Macquarie experts conduct ground-breaking research as part of the PCHSS. They are among the 17 PCHSS researchers, including health economists, scientists and clinician researchers, across seven universities and five funding partners, working to provide innovative solutions to the challenges facing healthcare systems worldwide.

Led by Professor Braithwaite, the unique structure of the five-year grant embeds the researchers within the health system to work directly with health organisations. This ensures timely and sustainable improvements to the Australian healthcare system which, to date, include informing the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety; the development of national healthcare policies; and the evaluation of health system programs and innovative models of care.

“Even before this pandemic, healthcare systems were being challenged by threats to their capacity to deliver high-quality care,” says Professor Braithwaite. “These threats include ageing populations, increasing rates of chronic and complex diseases, fragmented services, growing cost pressures from new technologies and medicines, wasteful spending on low-value care and limited use of data and evidence to support healthcare system changes.”

Picture: clockwise from left: Sidong Liu, Jeffrey Braithwaite, Johanna Westbrook, Enrico Coiera, Yvonne Zurynski, Andrew Georgiou.

Early Career Researcher of the Year award recognizes outstanding performance in research by an early career researcher who is within five years post-completion (formal award) of his/her PhD or MPhil degree.

The Excellence in Research – Five Future-shaping Research Priorities awards recognise excellence in scholarly research, the creation and application of research outcomes, the discovery of new knowledge or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way to generate new concepts, methodologies and understanding.  The research should take the form of a significant and novel advance in research which has the potential to deliver substantial benefits to Australian and/or international communities in the fields of the creative arts, culture, education, the environment, health, industry, the law, public or social policy, technology or commercial enterprise.

CENTRES RELATED TO THIS NEWS

Centre for Healthcare Resilience and  Implementation Science

Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research

Centre for Health Informatics

NHMRC Partnership Centre for Health System Sustainability

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Chrissy Clay, Media and Research Outreach Coordinator

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