Professor Rachel Allavena is a specialist veterinary pathologist, multidisciplinary researcher and Deputy Head of School, at the School of Veterinary Science, Gatton. She develops cancer treatments called immunotherapies which wake up the immune system so it fights the cancer. Her unique approach uses pet dogs with natural cancer to conduct the research. This helps the dog and it's family, as well as progressing the development of veterinary treatments and simultaneously advancing human medicine. As Deputy Head of School she aims to support staff and students to make UQ one of the top school's in Australasia, supporting both pets and people. Rachel is a multi-award winning teacher, lecturinging in veterinary pathology, toxicology, animal welfare and laboratory animal science. Her specialist expertise is nationally and internationally recognised in forensics, animal cruelty and toxicology where she acts as an expert witness in criminal and civil legal cases. She is a strong advocate for racing animal welfare, investigating racing animal injury and deaths and conducting research on how to improve animal welfare in sport, society and research. Prof Allavena has an active media profile and has been featured in national and international media including The Conversation, ABC national and regional radio and TV news, commercial and community TV and radio. In 2022-2023 she is a 'Flying Scientist' for Queensland's Office of the Chief Scientist. Rachel really enjoys doing presentations to school students and teachers as well as public outreach events to promote science to the general public. She has presented a TEDx talk on how dogs can help us cure cancer.
Prof Allavena has a PhD in Comparative Medicine from Cornell Univesity in New York, and undertook her pathology specialistation at Ontario Veterinary College. She has worked in drug safety research and development in the pharmaceutical industry in preclinical safety testing and discovery research in the United Kingdom. Her research interests are strongly focused on comparative and translational medicine and animal model validation and development in rodents, dogs and other laboratory animal species. Her major research projects include developing novel cancer immunotherapics and diagnostics for pet dogs naturally suffering from cancer both as a veterinary therapy and comparative model for human cancer. Further, she has extensive research in drivers of koala population decline in SEQLD. She has wide ranging research collaborations specialising in the pathological assessment and study design for animal models in a variety of areas including novel therapeutics, drug safety, toxicology and natural envenomations, biometallic implants, and animal welfare in laboratory animals and domestic species. She is a board certified veterinary anatomic pathologist with the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP) and a registered specialist veterinary anatomic pathologist with the Veterinary Surgeon's Board of Queensland through the Australian Veterinary Boards Council. She is the lead diagnostic anatomic pathologist in the UQ School of Veterinary Science Veterinary Laboratory Service, and in her professional capacity she oversees cases for Racing Queensland, Queensland Police and RSPCA Queensland, with a special interest in animal welfare and forensic pathology. She has an extensive successful track record of training anatomic pathologists for American College of Veterinary Pathology board certification. She was awarded a Faculty of Science Teaching Excellence Award in 2015 and a UQ Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2021. She has served as an office holder in the Pathobiology chapter of the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists and the Australian Society of Veterinary Pathologists.
Dr. Laura Grogan is a qualified veterinarian, Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Science, Chair of the Wildlife Disease Association Australasian section, and Leader of the Biodiversity Health Research Team (https://www.biodiversity-health.org/) - a collaborative multiple-university research group focused on finding sustainable solutions for the most challenging threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity.
Dr. Grogan has a background in research on wildlife diseases, ecology and conservation. She's particularly interested in investigating the dynamics, relative importance, and impacts of infectious diseases among other threats affecting wildlife across both individual and population scales, to improve conservation management. While she works across taxa and methodological approaches, her main study system currently involves the devastating amphibian fungal skin disease, chytridiomycosis, where at the individual scale she focuses on the pathogenesis and amphibian immune response to the disease, untangling the roles of resistance and tolerance in defense against infection. At the population and landscape scale she explores mechanisms underlying persistence in the face of endemic infection, focused on the endangered Fleay's barred frog. She also studies population and infection dynamics of chlamydiosis in koala using a mathematical modelling approach, exploring the relative benefits of different management approaches. In addition to working on amphibian and koala diseases, Laura is a keen birdwatcher and wildlife photographer, and supervises projects in other wildlife-related fields.
You can find out more about her research team here: www.biodiversity-health.org. Dr. Grogan has been awarded around $1.3 million in research funding since 2018. In late 2019 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA; DE200100490), worth $426,742. This project, titled "Understanding infection tolerance to improve management of wildlife disease", commenced in late 2020. Dr. Grogan was identified as one of the four top-ranked science DECRA awardees by the Australian Academy of Science’s 2020 J G Russell Award, and was also recipient of the highest award of the Wildlife Disease Association Australasia Section with their 2019 Barry L Munday Recognition Award.
PhD and Honours projects are now available in the following areas (plus many more areas - please get in touch if you have an idea):
Can frogs be ‘vaccinated’ by antifungal treatment of active infections to develop protective immunity to the devastating chytrid fungus? (Principal Supervisor)
Establishing the conservation status of south-east Queensland’s amphibians - occupancy surveys and species distribution models (Principal Supervisor)
Tadpoles as a reservoir of the lethal frog chytrid fungal disease – measuring sublethal effects on growth, time to metamorphosis and ability to forage (mouthpart loss) (Principal Supervisor)
Impacts of chytrid fungus on the survival of juvenile endangered Fleay’s barred frogs, Mixophyes fleayi, and importance for population recruitment (Principal Supervisor)
Measuring the infection resistance versus tolerance of barred frogs to the devastating chytrid fungal disease to improve management outcomes (Principal Supervisor)
Mapping the impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frog habitats (Co-Supervisor)
Bowra birds: what do long-term monitoring data reveal about bird communities in the semi-arid region? (Co-Supervisor)
Impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frogs: Implications for conservation and management (Co-Supervisor)
Chiara is Professor in Veterinary Pathology at the School of Veterinary Science (SVS) of the University of Queensland (UQ). She is a board certified specialist veterinary pathologist (Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Pathology), graduated with a DVM from the University of Teramo (Italy) in 2002 and a PhD in Ultrastructural Pathology in 2006. Before joining UQ in 2012, she has been working as an Assistant Professor in Veterinary Pathology at the University of Teramo (Italy). She has a specific research interest is small animal oncology, in particular canine prostate cancer, and veterinary oncoepidemiology. She is Chair of the canine prostate cancer subgroup at the Oncology Pathology Working Group (OPWG), co-coordinator of the Global Initiative for Veterinary Cancer Surveillance (GIVCS) committee for the establishment of international standards of veterinary cancer registration and team leader of the comparative oncology theme of the Queensland Alliance of One Health Science. She is also member of the board of the Veterinary Cancer Guidelines and Protocols (VCGP) group, member of the Oncology Committee of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) and chair of the ESVP/ECVP DEI task force. She is past President of the Australian Society for Veterinary Pathology and, within UQ SVS, she has been postgraduate coursework coordinator (2014-2017), HDR coordinator (2017-2019) and Director of Research (2019-2021). She is now coordinator of the UQ SVS veterinary pathology postgraduate training program. She has received several academic awards, including SVS awards for research excellence (2017, 2021), best lecturer (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), and UQ award for excellence in HDR supervision (2020). She has published more than 120 papers on international journals, 3 book chapters and numerous abstracts in proceedings of national and international conferences. She has > 15 years expertise in veterinary diagnostic pathology, histopathology, IHC and TEM in multiple species. Since her first academic appointment in 2005, she mentored several postgraduate and undergraduate students in diagnostic investigation of animal cancer and research in canine oncology. Although outside the field of comparative oncology, she also a unique expertise in avian pathology and transmission electron microscopy.
