51 newly promoted and recruited Professors are taking part in the 2018 Professorial Inaugural Lecture series at UNSW Sydney to mark their achievement and showcase their specialist knowledge. Please join us for the third in the 2018 series with two Professors from Medicine UNSW.
Lecture 1: Professor Danny J Ekert
Sleep, the next frontier in medicine and the 3rd pillar of health: New approaches to understanding and treating sleep-related breathing disorders
Inadequate or disrupted sleep due to a medical condition or sleep disorder adversely affects every organ in the body. 4/10 Australians have inadequate sleep. Last year, inadequate sleep cost the Australian community $66 billion. Obstructive sleep apnoea is the most common sleep-related breathing disorder (affects > 1 million Australians). The first-line therapy (continuous positive airway pressure: CPAP) developed here in Australia is highly efficacious. However, it is often poorly tolerated (~50% failure rate). This lecture will highlight new discoveries into why people get sleep apnoea and how this work is being used to develop much-needed new targeted therapies.
Lecture 2: Professor Jane Butler
Breathing is not just in the lung
Breathing muscles are important skeletal muscles essential for life, yet in comparison to limb muscles relatively little is known about how they are controlled by the brain and spinal cord. This lecture will demonstrate some of the recent discoveries about the way breathing muscles are controlled in health and disease and highlight a new method to improve respiratory function after spinal cord injury.
Timings: Talks 3.30 - 5pm, followed by a cocktail reception.
Registration: Open from 3.00pm
Location: The Chancellery, Council Chambers, Gate 9 UNSW (Building C22) Google map
Professor Danny Eckert trained in sleep and respiratory physiology at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health where he completed his PhD in 2006. He then spent 5.5y at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School where he was an Assistant Professor. He is currently a NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Principal Research Scientist at NeuRA where he heads the clinical sleep research program. His research focuses on identification of the causes of sleep apnoea and related breathing disorders and development of tailored therapies using novel respiratory phenotyping techniques. He is a strong advocate for the importance of sleep health.
Professor Jane Butler (PhD) graduated in 1999 from UNSW, worked at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, University of Miami supported by a NHMRC post-doctoral fellowship, and has returned to Australia in 2002 to continue her research at NeuRA. She has a broad interest in the control of human motoneurones in health on disease with a focus on the control of respiration. Current studies include investigation of the behaviour of single motor units in respiratory muscles and respiratory neural control during normal breathing and in patients with respiratory disorders such as obstructive sleep apnoea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and methods to improve respiratory function and health after spinal cord injury. She also studies the changes in the motor pathway that occur during normal movement and fatigue.
