With an unexpected gift in their wills left to The University of Queensland, Maryborough locals Alfred and Olivea Wynne – known for their contributions to the town’s business, music and community – created a legacy for themselves that would span generations of students.

Despite no known connection to UQ, in the late 1960s, the Wynnes left $200,000 to endow a memorial scholarship in their name at UQ. The scholarship provided students from their hometown and the Wide Bay area financial support to study at the University – an act of extraordinary generosity that has supported almost 750 locals since 1972.

Tracy Comans received one of these scholarships in 1987 as a physiotherapy student living at Union College. She is now an Associate Professor and a NHMRC researcher at UQ’s Centre for Health Services Research.

“My mother always drilled into me that I have to go to university because she hadn’t had the opportunity, and I think she always felt trapped by her lack of education in that she didn’t really have options,” Tracy recalls.

“Originally, I actually wanted to be a vet – that was up until Year 10 when I did work experience at a vet clinic and I realised I was too squeamish.

“When I couldn’t do vet, I thought I’d work with people, because you can at least explain to them why you’re doing what you’re doing. So I ended up choosing physio.”

For Tracy and other students coming to UQ from the Maryborough and Wide Bay area, the scholarship helped pay for critical learning equipment like textbooks.

“It basically covered my textbooks and some uniforms for prac. The extra support was really helpful,” she said.

Following her Bachelor of Physiotherapy (’90), Associate Professor Comans returned to UQ to complete a Bachelor of Economics (’96), Bachelor of Economics (Honours) (’98) and a PhD in physiotherapy (’10).

“I came back to study because I think I’m just a curious person,” she said.

“I like knowing about the world and how things work, and after I finished physio, I didn’t feel like I had a very broad education because the degree is very tailored for that specific job.”

Her work now as a researcher at UQ’s Centre for Health Services Research and adjunct Research Fellow in the Metro North Hospital and Health Service meets at the junction of these academic interests.

“My work is really an intersection of all the learning that I’ve had: I’m working in health economics, so investigating health services and value for money,” Associate Professor Comans said.

“Most of our health services in Australia are publicly funded, and we want to know that that money is going towards improving health – we don’t want the money that we’re spending to be wasted.”

Reflecting on her scholarship, she acknowledges that the meaning of the support went beyond just the financial assistance.

“Looking back, I think it’s really lovely to get that recognition for the work you’ve put in and that somebody is willing to support you in achieving your goals,” she said.

“It’s not even necessarily the amount of money: it’s that someone is willing to do something for someone else that’s really the important thing.”

The Alfred and Olivea Wynne Memorial Scholarship is testament to the transformative effect gifts in wills can have. It also speaks to the ever-growing impact of endowed funds, from Tracy’s modest support for textbooks and uniforms in the 1980s to the substantive $3,000 scholarships that were awarded to 25 students in 2020.

For every new endowed fund created during the campaign by bequests like this, students in need will benefit for generations to come.

Because of you, the good doesn’t stop.

University of Queensland researchers have discovered a new ‘seeding’ process in brain cells that could be a cause of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute dementia researcher Professor Jürgen Götz said the study revealed that tangled neurons, a hallmark sign of dementia, form in part by a cellular process that has gone astray and allows a toxic protein, tau, to leak into healthy brain cells.

“These leaks create a damaging seeding process that causes tau tangles and ultimately lead to memory loss and other impairments,” Professor Götz said.

Professor Götz said until now researchers did not understand how tau seeds were able to escape after their uptake into healthy cells.

“In people with Alzheimer’s disease, it seems the tiny sacs transporting messages within or outside the cells, called exosomes, trigger a reaction which punches holes in the wall of their own cell membrane and allows the toxic seeds to escape,” he said.

“As more tau builds up in the brain, it eventually forms tangles, and together with abnormally configured proteins known as amyloid plaque, they form the key features of these neurological diseases.”

Queensland Brain Institute researcher Dr Juan Polanco said the findings would help scientists piece together how non-inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias occur.

“The more we understand the underlying mechanisms, the easier it will be to interfere with the process and to slow down or even halt the disease,” Dr Polanco said.

“Along with Alzheimer’s, this cellular process might also play a leading role in other cognitive diseases, from frontal lobe dementia to rare neurological disorders with toxic tau.

“Even in cancer research, there is emerging evidence showing these exosomes can load unique messages that reflect the condition of tumours and enables them to replicate and spread cancer more quickly through the body.

“Improving our understanding of how Alzheimer’s and other diseases spread through exosomes will allow us to create new ways to treat and intervene in these cellular processes in the future.”

Professor Götz directs research at QBI’s Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research. A team in his research group, led by Dr Polanco, is looking at the role of exosomes and cell dysfunction as a risk factor in neurodegenerative diseases.

This research is published in Acta Neuropathologica (DOI:10.1007/s00401-020-02254-3, PMID: 33417012).

It has also been featured in the US-based AlzForum website.

Media: UQ Communications, communications@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 1120, +61 424 002 566.

More than 690 million celestial objects have been catalogued, photographed and are now available online for exploration by the public, thanks to an international research collaboration.

In a collaboration including The University of Queensland, The Australian National University and researchers from around Australia, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has released its second set of data, mapping roughly an eighth of the night sky and seeing far back in time to half the age of the known universe.

UQ’s Professor Tamara Davis, co-leader of the Australian venture (OzDES) with the ANU’s Dr Christopher Lidman, said the project was attempting to answer the big questions.

“’What is the universe made of?’, ‘how did it begin?’, ‘how will it end?’ and ‘how do the laws of physics work?’ – these are just some of the mind-boggling questions we hope to answer,” Professor Davis said.

“To tackle them, we’ve had to photograph and map the sheer vastness of the universe, not only in space, but far back in time, before Earth existed.

“For almost eight years we’ve been busy mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies and discovering thousands of supernovae.

“This extensive mapping allows us to measure the history of cosmic expansion and the growth of large-scale structure in the universe, both of which reflect the nature and amount of dark energy in the universe.

“I’m excited to use the data to investigate the nature of dark energy itself, which should reveal what’s behind the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

“This is one of the biggest mysteries in science and although we haven’t solved it yet, with this new data we’re one step closer.”

The DES began observations in 2013 with a state-of-the-art astronomical camera fixed on a four-metre aperture telescope in Chile.

Meet the UQ graduate behind the first COVID-19 home diagnostic tool

Dr Sean Parsons saw firsthand the huge impact of a pandemic when he was only a few years out of UQ and working as a young doctor in the emergency department of Caboolture Hospital.

What he saw on the frontline in 2009 was a system in crisis, barely coping with the large number of people presenting with suspected swine flu, whose symptoms could only be accurately diagnosed through sending samples to a laboratory from which they would return several days later.

In just over a decade since then, Parsons (Bachelor of Science (Honours) ’01, Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery ’05) has turned into an international medical entrepreneur – largely through the development of a rapid and accurate flu test.

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“That sculpting needs to take place on time scales of trillionths of a second, so that’s too fast to sculpt using any moving parts or electrical signals – think of it like shooting a ball of clay at high speed through a static apparatus with no moving parts, which slices up the ball, diverts the pieces, and then recombines the pieces to produce an output sculpture, all as the clay flies through without ever slowing down.

Dr Fontaine said there was no device that could fully control and shape a light beam in 3D before the team developed this technique.

“It’s very important to control light delivery as accurately as possible for many applications, ranging from imaging to trapping objects with light, to creating very intense laser beams,” Dr Fontaine said.

Using the new device, researchers will be able to conduct experiments that were previously impossible, putting theoretical concepts in many fields to the test.

This research was published in Nature Communications.

Media: Dr Mickael Mounaix, m.mounaix@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 3529; Dr Joel Carpenter, j.carpenter@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 1656; UQ Communications, Genevieve Worrell, g.worrell@uq.edu.au, +61 408 432 213.