Research awards

The aim of the annual Asthma and Airways Career Development Fellowship, in partnership with the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand (TSANZ), is to enable mid-career investigators to establish themselves as independent, self-directed researchers and foster the development of research in respiratory medicine in Australia and New Zealand. The fellowship is to the value of $60,000 for one year.

The fellowship is announced at the TSANZ Annual Scientific Meeting in April each year.

We are very pleased to contribute to respiratory research in this way and to assist with the career development of an emerging respiratory expert. This is a small way in which the National Asthma Council Australia can acknowledge the ongoing assistance of the many respiratory experts who provide advice and expertise to us for our resources and educational programs for primary care health professionals and people with asthma.

Further details, including eligibility and assessment criteria, are available from the TSANZ website.

2024 recipient

Associate Professor Rachel Peters has been announced as the recipient of the 2024 Asthma and Airways Career Development Fellowship.

Associate Professor Peters plans to use the Fellowship to develop an innovative asthma risk prediction tool for children that extends beyond traditional asthma predictors by integrating comprehensive data on food allergies.

Associate Professor Peters said that this will be the first prediction model to integrate food allergy, a key driver of adverse respiratory outcomes.

“Development of an asthma prediction model that integrates food allergy is of critical importance to help identify young children at high risk of developing asthma, especially with the high prevalence of food allergy in Australia.

“I am delighted that the 2024 Asthma and Airways Career Development Fellowship will allow me to develop and validate a novel prediction model for asthma risk in children,” she said.

Associate Professor Peters is the Principal Investigator of HealthNuts* and EarlyNuts*, two population-based longitudinal studies of food allergy and asthma recruited with identical methods and is ideally placed to establish a new paradigm for more precise asthma risk assessment.

“The HealthNuts study showed that infants with food allergy, even if their food allergy resolves, are four times more likely to have asthma at six years of age, compared to children who never had food allergy.

“My aim is to develop a prediction model that will greatly assist clinicians to provide early asthma diagnoses and management and promote prevention strategies in high-risk children,” she said.

Read more

Past recipients

2023 - Dr Bronwyn Brew, Senior Research Fellow at the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit at the Centre for Big Data Research in Health and School of Clinical Medicine, Discipline of Women’s Health, University of NSW. Read more

(Please note there was no 2021 fellowship awarded.)

2020 - Dr Simon Craig, Emergency Physician, Monash Medical Centre and Adjunct Clinical Professor, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health, Monash University. The fellowship will support research into seeking a global agreement on core outcome measures relevant to acute severe paediatric asthma. Read more

2019 - Dr Kimberley Wang, Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia, for 'The effect of intrauterine growth restriction on allergy-induced airway hyper-responsiveness'. Read more about Kimberley here.

2018 - Dr Hayley Scott, University of Newcastle. Her research topic is: Exercise, diet and obesity for asthma management: it’s time to weigh up our options.

2017 - Dr Adam Collison, University of Newcastle. The research topic is: The impact of improved asthma management in pregnancy on immunological education and programming in the first year of life.

2016 - Dr Miranda Ween, University of Adelaide and Royal Adelaide Hospital. Her research topic is e-cigarettes cause airway macrophage dysfunction: role in airway inflammation and steroid resistance in severe asthma.

2015 - Adjunct Associate Professor Brad Zhang, Associate Professor (asthma genetics research) in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Australia. The research topic is “to compare genome-wide transcriptional and methylation profiles in CD4+ cells in ‘newly arrived’ and ‘long term’ Chinese immigrants living in Western environments”.

2014 - Dr Katie Baines, post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Newcastle. Her research topic is identifying biomarkers that predict severe asthma exacerbations during pregnancy.