Read the latest news about the Training Centre, including placements, conferences and opportunities.
The secret world inside a snail: Exploration of terrestrial snail parasites, worldwide and in Australia
When we think about biosecurity risks at Australia’s border, we often picture plants, seeds, or soil. But what about the tiny hitchhikers inside the snails clinging to the outside of a shipping container? “Biosecurity risk assessments of invasive snails tend to focus on the agricultural impact,” says PhD student Bethany Perry, University of Canberra. “But it’s also…
Field to FASTA: Piecing Together the First Genome of a Sugarcane Pathogen
At our August 2026 Research in Progress seminar, PhD student Lavi Singh took us through a project that started with next to nothing: no sugarcane plants, no spore stocks, and no established protocol to work from. Lavi’s PhD, in collaboration with Sugar Research Australia, is focused on the rust fungus causing sugarcane brown rust disease, Puccinia melanocephala.…
Refining DNA Extraction Protocols for Scale Insect Nymphs
At our August 2026 Research in Progress seminar, first-year PhD student Yilin Bai took us through a project that, on the surface, sounds like a small technical problem: how do you get enough DNA out of an insect barely big enough to see? In practice, it’s turned into a months-long troubleshooting exercise that’s identified the…
Reflections from Parliament House: Pandemics, Preparedness and Prevention
In August, I had the privilege of attending “Pandemics, Preparedness, Prevention – Australia’s Role in Global Leadership,” a breakfast panel at Australian Parliament House hosted by Wildlife Health Australia on behalf of Friends of One Health. There’s something special about walking into Parliament House for a conversation about ecosystem health — and this one came…
Innovation Ignition Grant Winner. Bio-SORT: Biosecurity Sample Optical Recognition and Triage
Our third and final Innovation Ignition Grant project takes on a very practical bottleneck in forest biosecurity surveillance: there’s often more trap material than there are expert hours to examine it. The challenge: Programs like Forest Watch Australia rely on panel traps to catch insects for biosecurity surveillance — but a single program can generate over…
Innovation Ignition Grant Winner: Standardising Molecular Diagnostics for Plant Biosecurity Using Multi-Target DNA Reference Materials
Our second Innovation Ignition Grant project tackles a problem that sits behind the scenes of every plant biosecurity test result: how do we know a diagnostic test is actually as accurate as it claims to be? The challenge: Molecular tests for plant pathogens — like qPCR and high-throughput sequencing (HTS) methods — rely on reference materials…
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