Team
Dr Tony Gendall
Head of Department
School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment
Department of Animal, Plant and Soil Sciences
AgriBio, the Centre for AgriBioscience
Gendall Lab Team
Left to Right - Sarah Rawlin; Jonathan Dragwidge; Dung Huynh Le; Sajal Sajal; Chathurika Hettiarachchi; Charlotte Francois; Himika Gupta and Lianna Sliwczynski. Absent Reem Joukhadour and Benjamin James Vincent.
Sarah Rawlin
Honours Student
Sarah completed her Bachelor of Science degree at University of Melbourne. She is currently working on an honours project in the Gendall Lab investigating various aspects of the aquatic herbicide Teton® which includes investigating its effectiveness in removing plants from an aquatic system and the unconfirmed loss of potency over time.
Jonathan Dragwidge
PhD Student
Jonathan completed his Bachelor of Biological Science (Hons) in 2012 and has since been researching in the Gendall Lab where he is working through his PhD on the role of Na+ H+ antiporter (NHX) proteins in plant development and subcellular protein trafficking in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Dung Huynh Le
PhD Student
Sajal Sajal
Masters Student
Chathurika Hettiarachchi
Masters Student
Chathurika completed a full fee scholarship bachelors in Biotechnology at University of Pune, India in 2012 before completing her masters in Food Science and Technology in Sri Lanka in 2014. After a short period working as a project executive at Bio Foods (Pvt) Ltd in Sri Lanka, Chathurika decided to commence her masters in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics at La Trobe. Her research at La Trobe includes expressing malarial Trx2 in Arabidopsis thaliana and genotyping the malarial Hsp101 expressed plants with the aim of developing a plant based platform to identify the malarial protein inhibitors.
Charlotte Francois
Honours Student
Lianna Jane Sliwczynski
Masters Student
While studying for her Bachelor of Science (Applied Biology and Biotechnology), with Honours in Medical Laboratory Science at RMIT University, Lianna spent time working on developed DNA sequencing and bioinformatics tools for bacterial infection control purposes at Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Other work placements include cancer diagnostics and assisted in clinical trials in Melbourne and at Hammersmith and Royal Marsden Hospitals in the UK before she came to La Trobe as a volunteer Research Assistant and Laboratory Technician with the Department of Animal, Plant and Soil Sciences. This led to work as a science demonstrator.
Lianna is currently completing her Masters of Science (Botany) using a novel in planta strategy to develop screening platforms for specific inhibitors of the malarial heat shock proteins (HSP101) that may be candidates for new antimalarial medicines.
Reem Joukhadar
PhD Student
Reem hails from Syria where she completed her Bachelor of Science Biotechnology at the University of Aleppo in 2010. She was also an assistant lecturer at the same university. Reem's other work experience includes stints at the Syrian and Egyptian branches of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) where she investigated molecular applications for wheat improvement and chickpea improvement.
La Trobe has awarded Reem with full fee and postgraduate research scholarships (LTUFFRS) and (LTUPRS) to continue her PhD research in breeding activities and artificial selection consequences on Australian wheat and applications of molecular tools for wheat improvement.
Benjamin James Vincent
Honours Student