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Now in its third year, the Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund (JMRF) continues to foster world-class research, training and clinical collaboration aimed at tackling global health challenges, while building long-term partnerships with collaborators and supporters.

Funded by the Jennie Mackenzie Bequest, the JMRF underscores the Centre鈥檚 commitment to collaborative, multidisciplinary research that addresses complex aspects of chronic disease and health.

The Fund supports projects led by Charles Perkins Centre members that build research capacity and benefit both the Centre and the broader research community. It also provides opportunities for early- and mid-career researchers to develop their research and leadership skills.

Projects funded in 2025 include:

• a coalition to improve adolescent engagement in chronic disease prevention
• a Hub developing tools to embed systems thinking in health research
• establishing a pioneering circadian assessment capability within the Charles Perkins Centre Mass Spectrometry facility
• establishing cutting-edge single-cell proteomic methods for analysing tissues such as the retina in relation to type 2 diabetes and other conditions.

The Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund was established in 2023, awarding almost $3.5 million to eight projects in its inaugural year. The JMRF awarded almost $800k to four projects in 2024 (listed below).

Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund 2025

Establishing the CPC Adeno Associated Virus (AAV) Accelerator for Precision Gene Function Research

Harry Cutler, Dr Stewart Masson, Dr Jacqueline Stoeckli

$50,000 for one year

Adeno Associated Viruses (AAVs) enable researchers to target genes of interest to specific tissues and cell types. This project will scale-up an AAV pipeline to be accessible to Charles Perkins Centre researchers, thereby improving access to cost-effective technologies and enhancing the scientific output of researchers within the Charles Perkins Centre.

Healthy Places, Healthy Futures Coalition: A systems approach to adolescent engagement in chronic disease prevention

Associate Professor Stephanie Partridge, Associate Professor Aaron Jenkins, Surabhi Dogra

$345,279 for three years

This project will develop and implement a transdisciplinary strategy to expand adolescent engagement in chronic disease prevention, using planetary health as the timely initial entry point. The initiative centres adolescents as partners, acknowledging their unique leadership potential. It integrates intergenerational equity, Indigenous knowledge, and participatory methods as foundational principles, supporting new solutions for chronic disease prevention and systems-level change across the Asia-Pacific.

CPC systems-centred research hub

Professor Melody Ding, Dr Susan Luo

$300,512 for two years

This team will establish a systems-centred research hub as an enabling platform to promote greater understanding and adoption of systems thinking, mapping and modelling as valuable tools for supporting CPC researchers to address complex public health problems. The systems-centred research hub will offer strategic advice, as well as technical support, to help research teams capitalise on the potential of systems approaches to improve and develop their work, including stakeholder management, root cause analysis, and designing interventions.

Transforming metabolic disease research: CPC's multidisciplinary imaging mass cytometry initiative

Associate Professor Mainthan Palendira, Dr Angela Ferguson, Dr Thomas Ashhurst

$50,000 for one year

Team members from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Medicine and Health will work to develop spatial biology capabilities to maximise data output for research groups across CPC and wider campus. The program aims to define the nature of immunometabolomic interactions through curation of appropriate immune and metabolomic markers and to assess the application of the selected immunometabolomic markers across a variety of tissue types affected by metabolic disease.聽

Circadian mass spectrometry: Scalable urine LC-MS/MS assays at Sydney for research and clinical care

Associate Professor Svetlana Postnova, Dr Lake-Ee Quek, Dr Parisa Vidafar

$100,000 for two years

A team with expertise in Circadian Physics, Sleep, Nutrition, Mass Spectometry, and Mental Health will establish a circadian assay capacity at the Sydney Mass Spectrometry facility to improve existing methods in circadian assessment by increasing accuracy, reducing costs, and lowering participant burden. Knowledge of circadian time/phase is critical in human and animal research, as it affects most biomarkers. It is also beneficial in clinical settings to optimise the timing of medications 鈥� a field known as chronotherapy; and to enable personalised medicine. This project will develop the Sydney Mass Spectrometry into the new go-to laboratory for circadian assessments in Australasia.聽

New lipid lowering interventions for metabolic disease

Professor Anthony Don, Alexis Diaz-Vegas, Dr Oana Marian

$100,000 for two years

A large body of research implicates lipid accumulation in the circulation, liver, and muscle as a driving force behind insulin resistance, which leads to type II diabetes, liver fibrosis, and cardiovascular disease. This program will update and expand the lipidomic analysis platforms that will be made available to all Charles Perkins Centre researchers. Work will also include developing world-first drugs that inhibit ceramide synthesis for the treatment of obesity, MASLD and liver fibrosis, and type 2 diabetes.

Single cell proteomics of the retina in health, ageing and disease

Associate Professor Mark Larance, Dr Shila Ghazanfar, Professor Jonathan G Crowston

$99,062 for two years

This team will establish state-of-the-art single cell proteomics (SCP) methods at the University of Sydney for the analysis of tissues such as the retina, which can be applied to understand a variety of disease states such as type I/II diabetes and glaucoma. It will also generate the first reference proteome maps for the mouse and human retina at single cell resolution, which will generate high impact publications and be leveraged by many other groups around the world to provide predictions of cell type contributions in 鈥渂ulk鈥� proteomics analyses of the retina.

Facilitating research translation by improving decision making in implementation, scale-up and sustainment across the health spectrum

Dr Karen Lee, Dr Yvonne Laird, Professor Philayrath Phongsavan

$47,789 for one year

Effective interventions tested on a small scale are rarely scaled-up to the population. There is considerable opportunity to reduce the time it takes to scale-up interventions using pragmatic evidenced-based tools. The Intervention Scalability Assessment Tool (ISAT) (co-developed by Dr Karen Lee) can boost research translation without compromising real-world impact through considered decision-making of interventions that are most likely to succeed when scaled. This project aims to support research translation across the Charles Perkins Centre and beyond by revising the Intervention Scalability Assessment Tool (ISAT) to account for critical scalability factors including equity, systems-thinking and sustainability, expanding the reach of the ISAT through wider dissemination and enabling data collection on the ISAT鈥檚 impact on improving scale-up.

Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund 2024

Development of a Solutions Domain - Implementation Hub within the CPC

Professor Tim Shaw, Dr Yu Sun Bin, Dr Nicholas Koemel

$ 417,248 for two years

The Implementation Hub bridges the gap between innovative research and its implementation in communities, health services and policy settings, ensuring that breakthrough findings in nutrition, sleep and physical activity reach those who most in need.

Embodying inequalities: Metabolic justice in the anthropocene

Professor Alex Broom, Dr Katie Kenny, Professor Jakelin Troy

$100,000 for two years

This project illustrates health as emergent through an evolving nexus of societal forms, historical processes, economic configurations and ongoing policy decisions. This broadens the interdisciplinary reach of all CPC members to include social sciences expertise, which is essential for exploring how metabolic health is emergent at the nexus of the biological and social systems.

The metabolic systems gateway: Unlocking multi-omics data for breakthroughs in metabolic disease research

Professor David James, Dr James Burchfield, Associate Professor Mark Larance

$124,082 for one year

This project will establish a fully integrated and accessible comprehensive database that enables researchers to access systems level information about molecules and pathways at the touch of a button. The project will be complementary to and work closely with the data scientists from the Charles Perkins Centre Data Hub, funded in the inaugural round of the Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund.

Integration of the AUSNUT database of foods and nutrient composition with an image library for automated dietary assessment

Professor Margaret Allman Farinelli, Dr Virginia Chan, Dr Juliana Chen

$41,250 for one year

This team will work closely with the Mackenzie Wearables Hub to develop a comprehensive suite of tools to analyse dietary intakes for researchers in the Charles Perkins Centre and Australian research community. This will include a database of images for machine learning for image-based dietary assessment that are linked to the AUStralian Food and NUTrient Database (AUSNUT) database of foods classification system, i.e. the standards for food composition in Australia; and continuing collaborative research to refine the meal timing algorithm applied to wearables data.