Visit from Suan Tan to the Clear Vision Research Lab!

I joined the Clear Vision Research group as a PhD student following a generous philanthropic gift by ANU alumna Dr Suan Tan, in honour of her late father K.T. Tan. This generous gift allowed me to kick-start my PhD research journey at the CVR lab in March of 2021, investigating extracellular vesicles as therapeutic delivery vehicles for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration.

I was certain that the nature of this scholarship with strong entrepreneurial focus will provide a wonderful ecosystem to undertake good research while also engaging and fostering new collaborations with industry. In addition to this- In the last 1.5 years, the scholarship has enabled me to attend international conferences (recently including, Blood EVs: an ISEV Workshop in Helsinki, Finland) and present my work, meet with industry leaders in the field of my research and most importantly build a close relationship with Dr Suan Tan herself who is so engaged and passionate about our work at CVR. Monthly catch-ups with Suan over whatsapp were definitely something I looked forward to every month!

Above: Photos taken from the Blood EVs: an ISEV Workshop in Helsinki, Finland where I had the opportunity to present my work.

Last week, it was wonderful to have Dr Suan Tan visit us on campus! We started off the day with breakfast with our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, with vibrant discussions about the impact of such philanthropic gifts to ANU. It was a great opportunity to share my experience with the K.T.Tan scholarship and how it has shaped my PhD journey so far. Following this, we took Dr Suan Tan on a tour of our lab and research facility at JCSMR, demonstrated key techniques used in our research and presented some of our exciting results from the last year.

It was wonderful to meet with Dr Suan Tan, who’s been a champion for the Clear vision research group, show her the labs where we undertake our work and introduce to her the whole CVR family who form this supportive ecosystem to train and support researchers in various stages of their research journey.