Media Releases

PhD awarded for work on disease-controlling enzymes

Thursday 19 May 2011

This week an exceptionally talented PhD student of the Centenary Institute was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Sydney’s Sydney Medical School.

The PhD thesis written by Sheena Yao provides new and greater understanding of two important enzymes believed to be involved in regulating the growth of tumours and the severity of chronic liver disease. The research for her thesis, titled Functional characterisation of fibroblast activation protein and dipeptidyl peptidase 9, led to presentations at several international conferences and contribution to three research papers. Her PhD was supervised by Dr Mark Gorrell from Centenary's Molecular Hepatology lab.

Born in Taiwan, Sheena moved to Sydney in 2001 to complete a Bachelor of Science (Molecular Biotechnology) with majors in Molecular Biotechnology and Molecular Biochemistry then a Master of Applied Science (Molecular Biotechnology) at University of Sydney.

Sheena is now intellectually immersed in the new and exciting field in neurodegenerative diseases as a postdoctoral trainee at the Gladstone Institute affiliated with UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) in the US. Sheena became an Australian citizen in 2010 and plans to return to Australia following her overseas training as she now calls Australia her second home.

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