Clunies Ross Award winners at Casey Tech School
On Monday 25 March, Dr Erol Harvey and Associate Professor Guillaume Lessene spoke to students at a Morning tea event at Casey Tech School in Berwick, Victoria.
Dr Harvey won the 2018 Clunies Ross Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his work setting up an export business. Minifab, based around micro fluidics He spoke to the students about this and his more recent work with the Bionics Institute developing the bionic eye, a monitor to help epilepsy sufferers and a treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.
Assoc Prof Lessene was part of a team that won the 2018 Clunies Ross Knowledge Commercialisation Award. The team from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne spent many years developing a new type of cancer drug to treat chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. The team have worked with pharmaceutical companies to brink their drug, venetoclax, to market. You can see a timeline of the venetoclax story on the WEHI website.
After sharing morning tea with the speakers, the students undertook activities involving gel electrophoresis of DNA and using virtual reality to ‘look inside’ the human body.
