UOW’s Vice Chancellor, Paul Wellings (Credit: UOW)

As stated on UOW’s website:

The Vice-Chancellor’s Awards aim to encourage and recognise exceptional performance from University staff members who demonstrate outstanding achievement in activities that are aligned to the University’s vision and strategic goals. The awards also support the University’s values of a workforce with strong performance expectations, recognition and celebration of initiative and enterprise, and staff who are recognised and appreciated for their contribution.

The award categories are:

• Outstanding Contribution to Teaching and Learning
• Excellence in Research Awards
• Global Strategy Award
• Outstanding Service for Professional Services Staff
• Excellence in Community Engagement
• Marie Lewis Award
• Rosemary Cooper Diversity and Inclusion Award
• Workplace Health and Safety Award
• 25 year Service Award

For the Excellence in Research awards 2018, Distinguished Professor Antoine van Oijen was named as the Vice Chancellor’s Research of the Year making significant contributions in advancing knowledge and achieving exceptional research outcomes. Congrats Antoine!

Distinguished professor Antoine van Oijen next to one of his single-molecule microscopes.

Welcome to the Single-molecule Biophysics @ UOW blog!

The purpose of this blog is to communicate the new and exciting research that we, as team van Oijen, conduct in our lab at the University of Wollongong.

If you are unfamiliar with our research, Our group develops the physical tools that enable the study of complex protein machines at the level of single molecules. By making real-time single-molecule movies of complex biochemical process we hope to unravel underlying molecular mechanisms and provide the fundamental knowledge required to understand disease mechanisms and catalyze drug development.

In particular, we are most interested in the processes of DNA replication. In pathogenic prokaryotes, such as bacteria, the DNA replication machinery is a very attractive potential antibiotic target. In more complex eukaryotes (like you and me), malfunction of the DNA replication machinery is underlies several major health issues.

Led by Prof. Antoine van Oijen, our team tackles this challenging research area by developing and using single-molecule approaches in the context of different levels of biological complexity: from well-defined, isolated replication complexes to the crowded, intracellular environment.

Watch this space because exciting things are happening at UOW.