Lea Medal Winners 2024
01 March 2024
From left: Board Chair Professor Maxine Morand, Dr Abby Douglas, Dr Dineika Chandrananda, CEO Professor Jason Payne
We are proud to announce the winners of Peter Mac’s Lea Medal for 2024 are Dr Abby Douglas and Dr Dineika Chandrananda.
Named after the Latin word for lioness, the Lea Medal was established in response to historic gender imbalances in the senior ranks of health and science - with $50,000 in support from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation to enable them to access career progression opportunities.
Now in its eighth year, the award helps to raise the profile of Peter Mac female-identifying researchers in the critical early to mid-stages of their career – a time when many face barriers and lack support.
Read about Dr Douglas' and Dr Chandrananda's outstanding contributions to science and medicine below.
Dr Dineika Chandrananda is a Senior Research Officer in Peter Mac’s Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics Lab.
She leads a bioinformatics team that develop methods to retrieve multi-omic data from circulating tumour DNA - including methylation changes, mutational signatures, inferred gene expression and fragmentomics information.
Her current research focuses on integrating these data layers through machine learning to detect residual disease after curative therapy, and to monitor how tumours evolve and acquire resistance as patients undergo treatment.
Dr Chandrananda is funded through a VCA Early-Career Fellowship and an NHMRC Ideas grant.
Her ongoing passion is to translate these minimally invasive methodologies to the clinic.
Dr Abby Douglas is an infectious diseases physician and post-doctoral clinician researcher.
Her area of interest surrounds improving diagnostics and management of fever and infection in heavily immunocompromised hosts.
She completed her PhD through the National Centre of Infections in Cancer (NCIC) at Peter Mac in 2023, where she studied the potential benefits of FDG-PET/CT in diagnosing and managing invasive fungal infections and neutropenic fever.
She was awarded the Peter Mac Medal for this work.
Her world-first randomised trial comparing FDG-PET/CT to conventional CT imaging in persistent and recurrent neutropenic fever found that FDG-PET/CT was superior in guiding antimicrobial management, and was associated with reduced length of stay.
Dr Douglas is the Implementation Fellow of the NCIC, and on the steering committee of several international trials.
She a lead author and steering committee member of the Australia and New Zealand consensus guidelines for management of neutropenic fever, and clinical trial lead of the Australia and New Zealand mycology interest group.