Research Opportunities

CSM is proud to advertise research opportunities to our members. This page will be updated with unique research opportunities, as well as links to projects through Parkville research institutes.

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Professor David Eisenstat, from MCRI is a Professor in Paediatrics oncology and has a PhD project opportunity that comes with a stipend, with enrolment through the Department of Paediatrics.

Linking determination of cell fate in the developing nervous system to paediatric brain tumours. The childhood brain tumour diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is currently considered an epigenetic disorder. Uniformly fatal, ~80% of children with DIPG have canonical H3K27M mutations of variant histones H3.3 and H3.1. Single cell RNAseq studies show that the majority of proliferating DIPG cells resemble oligodendroglial progenitor cells (OPC). The distalless (DLX) family of evolutionarily-conserved homeobox genes encode transcription factors expressed in the developing and mature brain. The DLX transcription factors are necessary for GABAergic interneuron development and tangential migration, in part due to direct regulation of other transcription factors that are either activated or repressed during forebrain development. Recent work from the lab has shown that the DLX transcription factors directly repress other transcription factors necessary and sufficient for OPC development.

The graduate student will learn advanced methods in molecular, cell and developmental biology as well as apply systems biology approaches, including ATACseq, ChIPseq and/or RNAseq to identify DLX2 gene regulatory networks in forebrain development and assess expression of these target genes in DIPG tumour speciments. In addition, the student will work with other members of the team to introduce DLX2 into patient derived xenograft models of DIPG established in tumour organoids and/or using the mouse model system

For further information please contact: Prof David Eisenstat

Email: [email protected]

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

Projects: https://www.wehi.edu.au/research-project/student-research-projects

Contact: Clinical student administration: Joanne Casey ([email protected])

Open day: September 2020

A message from WEHI:

Please review our website and identify research areas of interest to you and prospective supervisors in these fields: www.wehi.edu.au/research-field-page/research-fields

You can then contact researchers directly by email. We recommend sending your CV and a cover letter explaining your research interests, indicating that you as a current MD student are interested in vacation work. If they have a research opportunity available, they will respond to discuss this further. Please note however, our supervisors get many requests from students, therefore if you do not receive a response, it may be they are not available for supervision.

Due to the current situation with COVID-19, our Institute is not able to consider students for research placements. Our researchers hope to begin discussing placements with students once circumstances improve, but we are not able to confirm at this stage what the timeline is for the placements at the end of the year.

Please keep an eye on our website or social media pages for any updates. https://www.wehi.edu.au/news

https://www.facebook.com/WEHIresearch