Premier commends Monash medical alumna
Monash medical alumna, Dr Amanda Rickard
Monash alumna, Dr Amanda Rickard has received a 2011 Premier’s Award commendation for her PhD research into the cause of heart failure.
Dr Rickard accepted her award in the category of Health and Medical Research from the Victorian Premier at Government House.
The focus of Dr Rickard’s research has been the role of a steroid hormone receptor, labeled mineralocorticoid receptor (MR), in heart failure and high blood pressure.
According to Dr Rickard, clinical trials have shown that people with heart failure show marked improvement in their health after taking medication that blocks the MR together with their standard medication.
Her work has shown that removing the MR from inflammatory cells or cardiac muscle cells can protect the heart from inflammation, fibrosis and hypertension.
Dr Rickard also found that when the MR is removed from blood vessel cells, inflammatory cells are not able to invade the heart tissue and cause disease.
Dr Rickard is currently continuing with her research in France, having received a prestigious National Health and Medical Research Council Overseas Biomedical Training Fellowship to work at the INSERM Paris Cardiovascular Research Centre.
Since the publication of her thesis in 2009, Dr Rickard’s work attracted widespread international attention due to the high burden of heart disease on economies worldwide. In Australia, around 30,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.
Dr Rickard completed her PhD under the supervision of Dr Morag Young and was based at Monash University’s Department of Physiology and Prince Henry’s Institute.
The Premier’s Award for Health and Medical Research is an initiative of the Victorian Government and the Australian Society for Medical Research and is presented annually to an outstanding Victorian postgraduate health or medical research scholar.