The Marshall Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Training is pleased to congratulate Dr Aleksandra Debowski who has received a Healy Research Collaboration award in the 2016 Round of the Raine Medical Research Foundation Priming Grants, Prizes and Awards.
Aleksandra is a PhD graduate from Prof Barry Marshall at the Marshall Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Training in the School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Originally from Canada, Aleksandra was awarded an Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and an International University Postgraduate Award by the University of Western Australia, as well as a prestigious Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (2008) and a Postgraduate Scholarship D3 (2009-2011) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. She has published 7 research articles since 2012, and was awarded an NHMRC Early Career fellowship in 2013.
During her PhD and current post-doctoral studies, Aleksandra has concentrated on the development of inducible systems for the expression of antigens by H. pylori and the assessment of new pathogenicity determinants. In her project for the Healy award, she plans to use an inducible system to express the Type IV secretion system (T4SS) in H. pylori and to elucidate the role that cag-T4SS has in the development and progression of gastric cancer in a Mongolian gerbil model. The award funds her travel to Munich, Germany to conduct her research experiments in collaboration with the team of Prof. Dr. Rainer Haas at the Max von Pettenkofer-Institute for Hygiene and Clinical Microbiology of Ludwig Maximilians-University of Munich.