Clinton Kidman and Dr Ross Graham at the UK Synchrotron in Didcot, and with two of their posters at Bioiron 2019, in Heidelberg, Germany.

It has been a busy couple of months for Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute (CHIRI) liver researcher Dr Ross Graham and his PhD student Clinton Kidman, who have returned from representing CHIRI at back-to-back international engagements and kindly shared these happy snaps of their travels.

First stop was attending the Eighth Congress of the International BioIron Society (IBIS) in Heidelberg, Germany. Both Ross and Clinton were grateful to receive travel grants to attend the five-day event, Ross’s was from the Biochemical Society UK and Clinton’s an IBIS Conference Bursary.

Together, our talented duo presented three posters on their CHIRI research investigating how iron regulates changes to fat metabolism, work they performed in collaboration with fellow CHIRI researchers Associate Professor Cyril Mamotte and Dr Mark Hackett and researchers from the universities of Western Australia, Newcastle and Sydney. Their research seeks to better understanding the underlying mechanisms of two age-related conditions – non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and iron overload orders – and the links between them.

“It was great to present our CHIRI work on the world stage at the conference – the research was well-received and generated a lot of interest,” Ross said.

After the conference, Ross and Clinton travelled to the UK, where Ross gave a talk and caught up with collaborators at Queen Mary University of London.

Two days later, they were on a train up to Didcot, near Oxford, to visit the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s Synchrotron, where Clinton had organised to meet with the beamline scientists.

“We spent the afternoon speaking to the beamline scientists and were lucky enough to be given a tour of the facility,” Ross said.

“As users of the Australian Synchrotron, it was great to see how our facility compares to one more than 14,000 kilometres away and have the chance to exchange ideas about how to use technologies to their full potential with our international research community colleagues.”