Seong Hoong Chow, Golden Jubilee Postgraduate Research Award recipient (right) with Prof Rod Devenish, Acting Head, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Image: Dr Kip Gabriel.
Seong Hoong Chow has been awarded the Golden Jubilee Postgraduate Research Award as part of 50th anniversary celebrations at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
He will receive a $5000 annual top-up to his Monash Graduate Scholarship stipend and $5000 research grant during his PhD studies. The award is given to the Department’s top ranked candidate who has demonstrated outstanding academic merit. Seong Hoong was also one of the top students in the honours program in biotechnology at the Monash Sunway Campus, in Malaysia.
“I am grateful to the department for awarding me this award,” Seong Hoong says.
“It will help ease the financial pressures living away from home and allow me to focus on successfully completing my PhD.
“I will also spend the research grant component to travel to international conferences and laboratories, and buy a new computer.”
Seong Hoong, 25, a recent recruit to the laboratory of Dr Kip Gabriel, is studying the role of a toxin called Panton-Valentine Leukocidin in golden staph infection. This ‘bug’, otherwise known as Staphylococcus aureus, is commonly resistant to antibiotics in the community and hospitals, and causes everything from mild skin infections to blood poisoning and toxic shock syndrome.
Seong Hoong will try to uncover how S. aureus uses this toxin to target the mitochondria - the powerhouses of the cell - within immune cells called macrophages, and how these processes cause disease. He will also collaborate with two other researchers: Dr Thomas Naderer from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Dr Anton Peleg from the Department of Microbiology.
We wish him well in his research career.
