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Celebrating high achievers: Flavia Huygens

Project Leadership Award – Winner: Professor Flavia Huygens

Professor Flavia Huygens received the Project Leadership Award at the 2020 DMTC Annual Conference.

Professor Huygens receiving the Project Leadership Award from CEO DMTC, Dr Mark Hodge (left) and special guest dinner speaker Adam Goodes (right)

Professor Huygens is Associate Director at the Institute of Health Biomedical Innovation (QIMR-Berghofer), a Professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences at Queensland University of Technology and a director of Australian med-tech start-up company, Microbio.

Professor Huygens has shown excellent project leadership over the last year in seamlessly bringing together a multidisciplinary team from academia and industry to develop a rapid diagnostic with her company Microbio, which is helping to address significant issues in the diagnosis of bio-threat pathogens.

She is the pioneer behind the technology of InfectID®, which uses novel and innovative bioinformatic tools to genetically identify blood/plasma borne bacteria. This technology has been shown to distinguish between more than 10 closely related pathogens without the generation of false positives. This type of technology is critical for the military to respond to outbreaks of infection or deliberate biological attacks.

The way Professor Huygens has managed the complexities of working across partners to meet the delivery requirements has been second to none.

More information on this project is in our 2019 Annual Report here.