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My is Annabelle Duncan, my job title is the most wonderful title, I’m the Executive Director, Science Collaboration and Transition for the Biosciences Research Centre, which is a bit of a mouthful but it works.

When I left La Trobe twenty odd years ago I went to Monash for a couple of years, I then went to CSIRO for sixteen years and I was the chief of one of the divisions of CSIRO for six years, that’s essentially like a deans position in a University. I then had two years at Melbourne University and then I came here eighteen months ago.

It’s a really, really exciting time to be at La Trobe, there is so much going on here in all sorts of areas at the moment, but in the science field there is more investment going into science infrastructure at La Trobe at the moment than has ever gone on in the past, there is a lot of changes, a lot of really positive things happening at the moment, it’s a really exciting time to be here.

The Biosciences Research Centre is a joint venture between La Trobe University and the State Government through the Department of Primary Industries, construction is more or less starting now, the first of the demountables are now on the site at car park four which is where the building will be.

The intention for La Trobe is to use the Biosciences Research Centre to position itself as the major University for bioscience research, agricultural research and education in Australia, to attract students and to attract very high quality researchers from all round the world to come here and work with us.

My job is mainly to enable the collaboration between the scientists from both sides and also within the groups as well, obviously there is a lot more collaboration that could happen there. The collaborations don’t happen naturally, you do need to do a lot of work to build trust, to get people feeling comfortable working with each other to give away a little bit of the control in order to get a lot more outcomes from the work they do.

If people want more information about the Biosciences Research Centre they can log onto the La Trobe website and just type in Biosciences Research Centre and they will get to the relevant section of the web page, they can see the graphic building and find out more background information, they can also contact the Dean of Science or they can contact me if they wish to.