Jess’s Story
Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and the University of Melbourne
The WiSPP Future Award was a catalyst for being able to present at two major international meetings and re-engage with the international neuroscience community, my first attendance at an international conference since having my first child in 2015.
The challenges of developing my independent research team after returning from abroad, at the same time as starting a family and having a partner with restricted flexibility in their job, created an extremely challenging environment within which to juggle research and academic career development.
The inability to attend conferences and the lack of international travel has been a major barrier. Supported by the WiSPP Future Award which contributed towards travel costs, I attended the 2018 International Behavioural Neuroscience Society (IBNS) meeting in Florida, USA in June where I chaired and presented in a symposium.
There were numerous benefits from this meeting including the formation of strong collaborative networks which has already fuelled joint research projects and proposals to other international meetings, the invitation to be part of the organising committee for the 2019 IBNS meeting, as well as the face-to-face chance to foster a closer collaboration with an Australian postdoctoral researcher currently based in the US and interested to return to Australia and join my team.
Our conversations have stimulated joint application submissions for funding with the hope that I can help support an emerging female early career researcher in STEMM. The second conference was the 15th Meeting of the Asian-Pacific Society for Neurochemistry in August 2018 in Macao, China. I presented in an invited symposium with recent collaborators and this opportunity provided a unique chance to present unpublished work I have only recently generated, within a different area of research, and gain constructive feedback.
Both these trips have been immensely valuable towards building my international track record, especially at this pivotal transition stage in my career, and for this, I am truly grateful to WiSPP for their wonderful support.
About Jess
Associate Professor Jess Nithianantharajah is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and heads the Synapse Biology and Cognition laboratory.
She completed her doctorate in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Melbourne examining synaptic changes following learning and experience then commenced postdoctoral training at the Howard Florey Institute to further investigate gene-environment interactions modulating experience-dependent synaptic plasticity.
Jess’s research interests lie in understanding the role of synaptic genes in cognition and disease. Jess’s work provided the first evidence of dissecting the cognitive repertoire in mice to show that these cognitive components are differentially regulated by a family of postsynaptic scaffold proteins, providing novel insights into the evolution of cognition.