Dr Zhao has the best possible motivation to hunt for a cancer cure, watching relatives suffer from the disease. Forest Lake chemical engineer Chunxia Zhao is researching better methods to deliver life saving drugs to cancer patients at the University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.
The 31 year old has just received the Australian Postdoctoral Research Fellowship worth $315,000 to develop nanoporous materials that will help with specifically targeted drug delivery. The fellowship will provide her research financial support for three years.
Dr. Chun-Xia Zhao. Image Credit: The University of Queensland
The researcher says that her main motivation comes from watching a couple of close friends’ battle breast cancer. She said that he expected this fellowship to allow her to move towards commercialization.
Dr. Chun-Xia Zhao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomolecular Engineering in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN). Her research interests focus on the development of functional soft and hard materials (including complex emulsions, nanoparticles), biomineralization processes, microfluidic multiphase flows, interface science (liquid-liquid, liquid-gas and liquid-liquid interfaces).
Dr. Zhao received her Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from Zhejiang University (China), and then joined AIBN. She has contributed substantial high quality scientific papers published in international top refereed journals such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition, AIChE Journal, Journal of Chromatography A, and others.