2012 thomson reuters australia citation & innovation awards

CITATION AWARDEES
Research Field: Neuroscience
Professor Greg Stuart
The Australian National University
ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
Canberra
ACT 0200
Professor Greg Stuart is currently Head of the Eccles Institute of Neuroscience at
the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University.
He did his undergraduate at Monash University, majoring in Physiology, before
going on to do a PhD in Neuroscience at the ANU. He has developed and pioneered
methods that have allowed neuroscientists to probe the function of nerve cells at
an unprecedented level, and is considered a world expert on the physiology of
neuronal dendrites.
He has received a number of national and international fellowships and awards,
and was recently appointed to the Australian Academy of Science in recognition
of his seminal contributions to understanding how information is processed by
individual nerve cells within the brain.
*Professor Andrew Cockburn, Director ANU College of Medicine, Biology and
Environment will be accepting this award on behalf of Professor Greg Stuart.
Research Field: Plant Sciences
Professor Rana Munns
CSIRO
Plant Industry
Black Mountain Laboratories Clunies
Ross Street, Black Mountain
ACT 2601
Professor Rana Munns has worked towards improving crop production on soils
that are dry or saline. She is now Honorary Fellow at CSIRO Plant Industry in
Canberra, as well as Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia.
She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. She is recognised
internationally for her insights into the fundamental principles of salt tolerance,
and for the applications of these insights.
She characterised the critical processes for tolerance of salinity stress, and
showed how these differ from tolerance of drought stress. This work produced a
highly sensitive technique for identifying salt tolerant plants, and the discovery
of important genes for salt tolerance. She led a research team that discovered
novel genes for controlling sodium transport in ancestral wheat, crossed them
into modern durum wheat, and showed that these increased yield in saline soil in
farmers’ fields by 25%. This work has just been published in Nature Biotechnology.
* Mr John Passioura, Honorary Research Fellow CSIRO Plant Industry will be
accepting the award on behalf of Professor Rana Munns.
15