Faculty Researcher of the Year Award
This award is designed to reward an individual who has achieved exceptional research outcomes in the previous five years.
2026 Angus Johnston
Angus’ research focuses on developing technologies for precise therapeutic delivery and understanding the cellular processes that determine their activity. His group combines nanoparticle engineering, molecular biology and quantitative cell biology to develop new approaches for controlling where and how medicines act.
In recent work he has developed a platform that enables highly selective mRNA delivery in vivo, which is 10x more efficient than the current state of art (Nature Nanotechnology 2025 p1273). This technology has been licensed to CREATE Medicines for the development of in vivo CAR-T therapies.
Angus also leads major collaborative research programs, including the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence for Precision mRNA Therapeutics, co-director of the National Centre for Biopharmaceutical Optimisation of mRNA Therapeutics, as well as 2 ARC Discovery Project, an ARC Linkage grant and NHMRC Ideas grant. His work has been cited >16,000 times, with an H-factor of 62 and Field Weighted Citation Impact of 2.1.
2025 Natalie Trevaskis
Natalie has pioneered a new field of research investigating the central role of the lymphatics in acute, inflammatory and metabolic diseases, and developing novel drug delivery technologies to target the lymphatics to treat these diseases.
Natalie is a Clarivate Hi-Ci researcher in the field of pharmacology (2022-24). She has published ~100 peer-reviewed papers including in top-tier journals such as Nature, Nature Metab, Sci Adv, Nature Rev Drug Discov and J Control Rel. Natalie’s lipid prodrug platform, co-developed over 15 years, has been licensed to Puretech Health and spun out into Seaport Therapeutics, which raised $325M in 2024. Two prodrugs are in clinical development, with Lyt-300 showing success in Phase 1 and 2 trials.
Natalie leads a dynamic team of 6 postdoctoral fellows, 12 PhD and 2 honours students. She has secured over $50M in competitive funding including major grants from ARPA-H, NHMRC, MRFF and ARC. She co-leads the Centre for Optimisation of mRNA Therapeutics and a $5M NHMRC Synergy grant on long-lived vaccines. Prior to 2025, this award was called the Faculty Research Award and was presented to a senior researcher in recognition of having made a sustained and outstanding contribution to the Faculty's research. It reflected excellence in the application of knowledge to any aspect of the Faculty's research.
Prior to 2025, this award was called the Faculty Research Award and was presented to a senior researcher in recognition of having made a sustained and outstanding contribution to the Faculty's research. It reflected excellence in the application of knowledge to any aspect of the Faculty's research.
2024 Denise Wootten
Denise is internationally recognised for her work on G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Her multidisciplinary research program investigates molecular mechanisms of GPCR signalling, biased agonism and modulation of receptor function by accessory proteins for exploitation in drug discovery programs. Her program has pioneered very significant breakthroughs in structural elucidation of GPCRs by cryo-EM to understand ligand-receptor and transducer interactions. Ultimately her research aims to facilitate development of novel drugs for metabolic diseases.
Denise has published >100 research papers in leading journals, including 7xNature, 3x Science, 2xCell, with 5 of her publications listed as ESI highly cited papers.
Denise has received sustained competitive research funding since 2014 totaling >$40M (>$25M as CIA/Lead CI), including NHMRC fellowships (CDF, SRF, L2 Investigator), NHMRC Project, Ideas and Development grants, ARC DPs, LIEF and ITTC grants and major funding from industry. Denise also was the joint winner of the corresponding Vice-Chancellor’s Researcher of the Year Award 2024.