Career Development Funding Success

Each year the University of Newcastle’s School of Medicine and Public Health Research Management Committee allocate funding for career development grants with the goal to support Early and Mid-Career Researchers transition to independent researchers and on a trajectory toward being recognised as national and international research leaders in their field.

This year Madeleine Hinwood, from the CRI Data Analytics Team, has been awarded over $40,000 to travel to the US and work with the leaders in contemporary epidemiology at both Harvard and Boston Universities. Since 2020, Maddie has been working with a a multidisciplinary team including epidemiologists, biostatisticians, stroke neurologists, and preclinical neurobiology researchers in Australia and Sweden to develop a large, linked stroke patient dataset. The first project using this data was funded in 2021 for CRI’s PREDICT project, with the team applying modern epidemiological techniques and cutting edge machine learning processes to analyse this large data set with the goal to understand what combination of factors, including lifestyle and medications, might improve or impeded stroke recovery.

Dr Madeleine Hinwood, CRI Data Analytics Team Member

By visiting Harvard and Boston, Maddie hopes to leverage her background in stress-related neurobiology and neurological/psychiatric disorders in combination with modern epidemiological methods. Causal inference, or the ability to draw conclusions about causation from observational data sets, is a growing field in epidemiology and is of vital importance in areas where clinical trials cannot be run. At present, there are few researchers working in this field in Australia, despite its rapid growth internationally.

Congratulations Maddie and wish you all the best on your travels to the US.