Innovation
Issue No. 21 - February/March 2005
Tall Poppy Campaign
Tall story
Bringing an idea to life is all in a day’s work for Tall Poppy award winner, Dr Michelle Lane.
Dr Lane, a high achiever in the field of reproductive medicine, is the latest in a distinguished line of prominent SA scientists to be honoured.
The Tall Poppy Campaign was created by the Australian Institute of Political Science (AIPS) during the celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Australian Nobel Prize winning scientist Sir Howard Florey in 1998.
The aim was to foster a greater appreciation of the achievements of all our tall poppies of science and encourage Australian scientific and intellectual excellence by encouraging younger Australians to follow in their footsteps.
In SA, the Tall Poppy Campaign conducts a Reaching Kids Program which takes award winners out to secondary schools to talk to students about science.
The main emphasis is on speaking to students in Years 9,10 and 11 who are making decisions about whether to carry on studing science as an elective subject for their final school years, and those in Year 12 who are in the midst of making a decision regarding their preferred field of tertiary study.
Dr Lane gained a Bachelor of Science degree from The University of Melbourne with an Honours Degree from Monash University.
After working as both a Clinical Embryologist and Research Assistant she returned to postgraduate studies and received her PhD from the Institute of Reproduction and Development at Monash University in 1996.
She later studied in the USA and worked as a senior scientist at the Colorado Centre for Reproductive Medicine, USA for five years.
Recently returned to Australia, Dr Lane is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide where she is establishing a research team in the area of gamete and embryo development and pregnancy outcomes.
Besides her academic work based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital she is Director of the IVF Laboratory at biotech firm, ...
