Meet the Mater People Award Winners - Research Excellence Genesis Maternal Fetal Medicine

13/Jan/2021     Mater Group

Congratulations to Mater Research Genesis Maternal Fetal Medicine Research Group who won in the Research Excellence category of the Mater People Awards.     

The award sought to recognise outstanding contribution to impactful research resulting in a health-related breakthrough or innovation achieved through high quality research outputs, mentoring of the next generation of researchers and academic leadership.

The award was accepted by Chief Investigator, National Health and Medical Research Council Stillbirth Centre for Research Excellence Professor Sailesh Kumar, on behalf of his team.

Sailesh and the Genisis Maternal Fetal Medicine Research team have gained global attention for their ground-breaking work to improve neonatal outcomes for at-risk fetuses. Sailesh’s leadership is integral to the success of his research team.

He is an enabler of perinatal research, earning a first-place ranking in Australia/Asia Pacific and fourth worldwide for research publications in the field of “Fetus” (SciVal Feb 2020).

Recently, Sailesh was listed as Australia’s leading Scholar for Obstetrics & Gynaecology (The Australian, Sept 2020). With his team, they have developed predictive models for emergency caesarean birth and adverse neonatal outcomes, to help clinicians assess risk prior to birth.

They are dedicated to exploring novel ways to identify risk and reduce Australia’s stillbirth rates. Their paper identifying cerebroplacental ratio (CPR) as a key prelabour measure of fetal wellbeing has been cited 170 times and is incorporated into international guidelines.

Their recent work cited in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, showed that Sildenafil Citrate reduces the risk of fetal hypoxia in labour and emergency operative birth, raising the possibility of an affordable pharmacologic intervention to reduce obstetric intervention and improve neonatal outcomes.

As a result, in June 2020 the team was awarded a $3.4 m grant from the Medical Research Future Fund to further this research nationally. Prof Kumar and his team’s work is particularly relevant to minority and under privileged populations that have a disproportionately higher rate of adverse birth outcomes.

Congratulations to the other finalists for these awards including,

  • Palliative Care Team
  • Dr Katherine Irvine
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