Congratulations to Darren on the achievement of Associate Professor! With 95 research publications that have been cited over 4000 times, 12 grants and fellowships from NHMRC, ARC and NIH worth over $15M, 1 patent for an antimalarial in phase II trials, Darren has been recognised with awards from the International Metabolomics Society and the NHMRC. In addition, he has played a significant role in the development of units for the new Pharmacy and Pharm Sci degrees, and has served on committees for societies including the International Metabolomics Society and the Victorian Infection and Immunity Network. Dr Creek’s laboratory currently uses multi-omics approaches to study mechanisms of drug action and resistance, with a focus on discovering new medicines for the treatment of malaria.

Two new honours students for 2019 have joined the Creek Lab on exciting projects. Yasmina Abdallah and Nathaniel Pywell will be working on projects exploring novel antimalarial modes of action and the biology of the malaria parasite infected red blood cell. We welcome Yasmina and Nathaniel into the group and look forward to seeing their ground breaking research work over the next few months!   

The Creek lab currently has an opportunity for a new post-doc to join the lab. The new position requires a post-doc with parasitology experience to study the mechanism of action of OZ antimalarials using metabolomics and chemical proteomics techniques. Interested persons should apply at:

The Creek lab brought home the daily double at the 2016 MIPS HDR symposium with Anna Sexton winning first prize for her oral presentation and Katherine Ellis winning first prize for the posters. A fantastic effort on a day that demonstrated so much high quality science being done at MIPS. 

Congratulations to Anna Sexton for receiving the runner-up prize at the MIPS 3-minute thesis competition. Anna recently represented MIPS at the Monash-wide event in Clayton, and gave a captivating 3-minute presentation explaining how her PhD work will find out how malaria parasites 'talk to' uninfected red blood cells and cause disease. Well-done also to our close collaborator, Shaz Sivanesan from the FADDI lab, who won the audience-choice award at both the MIPS and Monash events.

Double congratulations to Ghizal. Last week she won a highly competitive poster prize at the Molecular Approaches to Malaria (MAM) conference for her work applying proteomics, peptidomics and metabolomics to understand the mechanisms of artemisinin resistance.  To top it off, this week she received official news that her PhD has passed and been ratified by the faculty.  Well done Doctor!

2015 was another successful year for NHMRC project grants, with 2 projects awarded funding in a highly competitive round. Funding was awarded for investigation of the mechanism of action of the novel triazine antimalarials, through a Project Grant led by Jonathan Baell (MIPS) in collaboration with the Avery (Griffith), Edstein (AAMI) and Ralph (Unimelb) labs. The other grant was led by Natalie Trevaskis (MIPS), which will use metabolomics approaches to investigate lymph-adipose interactions. We will also participate in another successful project grant led by Mike Inouye (Unimelb), using systems biology approaches to understand host-pathogen interactions involved in Typhoid disease. 

Congratulations to Amanda on completing her Honours year.

Dr Creek was recently promoted to Senior Research Fellow (Senior Lecturer) by the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University.