Plenary Speakers

Professor Michelle Haber

Professor Michelle Haber was appointed the inaugural post-doctoral scientist at Children’s Cancer Institute in 1984. She became Director of the Institute in 2000, and has been Executive Director since 2003. She holds a conjoint appointment as Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UNSW Australia.

Michelle has dedicated her entire professional life to improving clinical outcomes for children with cancer. She is one of Australia’s leading translational researchers and has become the face of Australian childhood cancer research internationally. She is world-renowned for her research into the childhood cancers neuroblastoma and leukaemia, which has led not only to key advances in our understanding of these diseases, but also to new clinical approaches that have improved survival rates.

Michelle is best-known for defining new molecular targets (genes and proteins that drive the growth and aggressive behaviour of cancers) as well as developing new therapies that attack those targets. Highlights of her career to date include working with Professors Norris and Marshall to implement minimal residual disease testing in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) which led to a doubling of the survival rate of children with high-risk ALL, and driving the development of Zero Childhood Cancer (ZERO), Australia’s first national child cancer personalised medicine program, which is improving outcomes for children with a range of high-risk cancers.

As Head of the Experimental Therapeutics Group, Michelle’s current research focuses on developing effective treatments for children with neuroblastoma, and extending these treatments to other childhood malignancies including brain tumours, leukemias and sarcomas. She is also actively involved in developing a number of new research areas arising from the world-leading ZERO program.

In 2007, Michelle was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to science in the field of research into childhood cancer, to scientific education and to the community. The following year, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from UNSW for her eminent service to the cancer research community. In 2014, she received the Cancer Institute NSW’s Premier’s Award for Outstanding Cancer Researcher of the Year, in 2015 was appointed an inaugural Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and in 2022 was elected to the distinguished Australian Academy of Science.

Dr Alex Knights

Dr Alexander Knights studied gene regulation in immune cells for his PhD, under the supervision of Drs Merlin Crossley and Kate Quinlan at the University of New South Wales. For his postdoctoral studies, Dr Knights relocated abroad to the University of Michigan, where his work focused on cell-cell signalling and crosstalk in various disease settings ranging from obesity, liver disease, bone fracture, and osteoarthritis. Recently, Dr Knights started his independent laboratory at Washington University in St Louis, where he will continue to focus on crosstalk mechanisms in osteoarthritis – in particular, how they govern the intersection of fibrosis, inflammation, and mineralization, and how pathological cell lineages emerge in the joint post-injury.

Dr Danielle Grotjahn

Danielle Grotjahn is an assistant professor at the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, USA. Her lab integrates cellular and structural biology imaging technologies to uncover how mitochondria remodel their shape, architecture, and composition in health and disease. Danielle received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Scripps Research, where she used cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging to solve the first three-dimensional structure of the microtubule-bound dynein motor complex in Dr. Gabe Lander’s laboratory. Danielle completed a short postdoctoral position in Dr. Grant Jensen’s lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before starting her independent career as a Scripps Fellow in 2019. She has been awarded consecutive Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation awards from the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation in 2021 and 2023, the Baxter Young Investigator in 2022, and named a Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2023.

Prof Randal Halfmann

Randal Halfmann obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 2011, then started his lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Early Independence Awardee of the National Institutes of Health. After uncovering functions for self-perpetuating protein states (prions) in yeast and humans, he moved in 2015 to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO, USA, where he is now an Associate Investigator. His lab investigates the biophysical mechanisms and biological consequences of protein supersaturation. Research in the Halfmann Lab seeks to understand how protein supersaturation and subsequent self-assembly controls the granularity of protein activity in space and time, in phenomena ranging from innate immune signaling to non-genetic evolution to age-associated neurodegeneration in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.