During the four-year fellowship, Dr Hedtke will establish her laboratory group within LIMS and receive funding to continue her cutting-edge research which brings genomics, epidemiology and entomology together with mathematics and public health to eradicate parasitic diseases that affect over a billion people worldwide.
Dr Hedtke said she is honoured to have been awarded the Fellowship, and looks forward to the possibility of new research collaborations across LIMS disciplines.
“I believe that if we’re going to make progress in the world, we all need to work together and combine our skills to solve problems,” she said.
“Parasitic diseases are widespread, and can lead to chronic physical disability, as well as economic and health disparities for those living in remote communities, including in Australia and in the Global South.
“This Fellowship is an amazing opportunity to connect with LIMS researchers across disciplines, and potentially come up with new solutions not only for problems like this which I investigate in my research, but also I hope my expertise can help others solve the problems they’re working on as well.”
LIMS Acting Director, Distinguished Professor Stephanie Gras, is excited to welcome Dr Hedtke to LIMS, and help expand her collaborations across the Institute.
“I’m so happy we have launched the Marilyn Anderson Fellowship to recognise and support researchers like Dr Hedtke – women who are leaders in science,” she said.
“It was clear during the selection process that Dr Hedtke’s approach to combat parasitic disease aligns with LIMS’s vision: to bring together disciplines and involve the community to not only make new discoveries, but also to develop real-world solutions to solve problems.”
Renowned biochemist Emeritus Professor Marilyn Anderson AO, after whom the Fellowship is named, hopes this opportunity will help Dr Hedtke build on her past success.
“I am delighted that Dr Hedtke has been selected to be the first Marilyn Anderson fellow. I know of her fantastic parasitic disease research. We need as many bright minds as possible to eliminate these deadly diseases, and I hope the Fellowship can support her to strive for this goal,” she said.
The LIMS Marilyn Anderson Fellowship was established to help high-achieving women in science reignite their careers after experiencing a disruption in their work as researchers.
For Dr Hedtke, this interruption came when she and her young family relocated to Australia after her first four years as a postdoctoral genomics researcher at the University of Texas, and then Cornell University in New York.
“When we packed up the family and moved, I shifted from being the breadwinner and a scientist to being primary caregiver for my kids – and that was a really big change,” she said.
While continuing to care for her children, she began working part time in Professor Grant Warwick’s lab in the then-School of Life Sciences – an opportunity which shifted her research focus to parasitic disease, and got her thinking about how to eradicate it.
Now, Dr Hedtke leads her own multidisciplinary team at LIMS and in the School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment (SABE), which brings together expertise in genomics, epidemiology, mathematics and parasitology to investigate infectious parasitic diseases which are common in the Global South.
In particular, her research focuses on mosquito-borne lymphatic filariasis, which is the leading cause of chronic physical disability across the world; and River blindness, which is spread by blackflies.
The hope is that through their research, they can help accelerate the eradication of these diseases by learning at a molecular level how they work, how insects carry and transmit the parasites and how our bodies react to them.
The team also seeks to use this knowledge to develop more targeted public health measures which better serve the communities which are affected by these diseases.
Her passion for bringing together these two sides of research – discovery and translation to the public – is another reason she is honoured to receive the LIMS Marilyn Anderson Fellowship.
“Professor Anderson’s career is astonishing, especially having faced the challenges women often experience in a male-dominated profession,” she said.
“She’s been amazingly successful, not only through her basic discovery research in plant defensins, which is always fascinating and interesting, but then finding ways to apply those results in a translational setting.
“This is what I aspire to do. I love research - finding out how the world works is what motivated me to become a scientist. But public service is really important to me, and what motivates me to continue work as a researcher is the hope that we’ll find a way to help improve people’s lives by using our expertise to solve real-world problems.”
Dr Hedtke began her work as LIMS Marilyn Anderson Fellow on 1 July 2025, and will continue in the role for the next four years.
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Dr Shannon Hedtke is the inaugural LIMS Marilyn Anderson Fellow and a research group leader at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS) and La Trobe’s School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment (SABE). Find out more about her research here.
