Associate Professor Sandra Nolte and Dr Edmond Kwan join Eastern Health Clinical School
Dr Edmond Kwan and Associate Professor Sandra Nolte
Eastern Health Clinical School has recently welcomed two new researchers to their team, bringing a wealth of knowledge and expertise in person-centred research and cancer genomics and bioinformatics.
Associate Professor Sandra Nolte will lead the new Person-Centred Research directorship in the school, which will champion research involving self-reported health outcomes and experiences, including patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).
She is a highly accomplished scientist who has worked in the broad field of person-centred research for over 20 years, most recently at the University of Melbourne. She brings with her a wealth of experience, expertise, national and international connections, and a strong academic track record. She was also recently elected by the society membership as President-Elect of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL).
Associate Professor Nolte brings an established and internationally competitive research program that will effectively translate to Eastern Health Clinical School and Eastern Health. She will also work closely with collaborators elsewhere within Eastern Health, as well as other health services, community health care providers, other Monash centres and programs, data linkage systems, and research groups at other institutions.
Dr Edmond Kwan has also joined the school as a Laboratory Head and Senior Research Fellow, with additional cross-appointments at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and Eastern Health. After completing his specialist clinical training, Dr Kwan received an NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarship to support his doctoral research under the guidance of Associate Professor Arun Azad, investigating whole blood RNA to characterise aggressive molecular subtypes in prostate cancer. He subsequently relocated to Canada for a postdoctoral fellowship at BC Cancer and the Vancouver Prostate Centre, University of British Columbia, where he worked with Associate Professor Alex Wyatt and Professor Kim Chi, internationally recognised leaders in prostate cancer translational research. His postdoctoral research focuses on developing tissue and circulating tumour DNA biomarkers to predict treatment outcomes in lethal metastatic prostate cancer, using samples from prospective clinical trials to deepen our understanding of disease biology and tumour evolution.
Beyond the laboratory, Dr Kwan has maintained strong links to patient care, serving as a Principal Investigator on early and late-phase clinical trials in prostate, bladder, and kidney cancer. He is on the translational research subcommittee of multiple trials led by the Australian and New Zealand Urogenital and Prostate (ANZUP) Cancer Trials Group. He also contributes samples to the Melbourne Urological Research Alliance patient-derived xenograft program. His research team strives to understand how genomic and epigenomic alterations identified in tumour tissue and blood can better guide therapeutic decision-making in patients with urological cancers.
Eastern Health Clinical School welcomes Associate Professor Nolte and Dr Kwan to Monash University, and look forward to the significant contributions they will make to the team and their broader research fields.
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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