Rebecca Poulos Receives 2024 Derek Hart Memorial Award and Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant

A Children’s Medical Research Institute cancer biologist has been awarded a 2024 Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant as well as the prestigious Derek Hart Memorial Award for her work on Childhood Cancer Research

The Derek Hart Memorial Award honors the legacy of Professor Derek Hart, who was deeply involved in medical research and served on the Ramaciotti Scientific Advisory Committee. The award is intended to acknowledge outstanding researchers who demonstrate innovation and dedication in their work, reflecting Hart’s commitment to advancing health and medical science.

The Ramaciotti Health Investment Grants, which accompany the award, provide substantial funding—up to $150,000—to support researchers in taking their projects to clinical application within five years. These grants are part of a broader initiative by the Ramaciotti Foundations, which are among Australia’s largest private contributors to biomedical research.

About Rebecca Poulos

Dr. Rebecca Poulos is a prominent researcher specializing in cancer genomics, proteomics, and data science. She currently serves as an NHMRC Early Career Fellow and Senior Research Officer in the Cancer Data Science Group (ProCan) at the Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) in Sydney, Australia.

Her research primarily revolves around cancer proteogenomics, where she utilizes large-scale data from cancer proteomes and genomes to identify signatures that can predict drug responses and patient survival outcomes. Dr. Poulos aims to understand the biological mechanisms underlying cancer by investigating associations between somatic mutations, DNA repair processes, methylation patterns, and gene expression.

“Cancer is the leading cause of death from disease in Australian children. There is an urgent need to improve precision medicine to advance outcomes in hard-to-treat paediatric cancers. Many diagnosis and treatment decisions in cancer are made by measuring proteins in tissue from biopsy,’’ 

Dr. Poulos completed her Honours and PhD at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where she received the University Medal for her outstanding academic performance. She has gained extensive experience in analyzing high-throughput cancer datasets and processing next-generation sequencing data.

Throughout her career, Dr. Poulos has received several prestigious awards for her contributions to cancer research, including the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society Outstanding Contribution by an Early Career Researcher in 2022, the Australasian Proteomics Society Ken Mitchelhill Award for early career research in 2020, and the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award from the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society in 2019. She was also recognized as a Cancer Institute NSW Rising Star PhD Student in 2017.

Dr. Poulos has published numerous articles in high-impact journals such as Nature, Cancer Cell, and Nature Communications, significantly contributing to the field of cancer research. In her current position at CMRI, she collaborates with a multidisciplinary team to analyze multi-omic data, aiming to answer clinically relevant questions in cancer biology. She has secured over $1.25 million in funding as a Chief Investigator and continues to push the boundaries of cancer research through innovative methodologies.

Children’s Medical Research Institute shared on LinkedIn:

“We are delighted to announce that Dr Rebecca Poulos has been given the prestigious Derek Hart Memorial Award and a Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant for her work which aims to change the way children’s cancer is treated.

Current testing is limited by sample availability and can take several weeks. In her project Dr Poulos wants to use mass spectrometry to study the proteins of paediatric cancer samples, in order to produce a report for clinicians within 48 to 72 hours that would help them determine which treatment would be most effective.

Dr Poulos will be designing an assay for 150 proteins that are important for childhood cancer, with a particular focus on hard-to-treat cancers.

Read more here.”

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