Our invitation to Year 10/11 students with an interest in STEM.

The Bionics Institute Girls in STEM Mentoring Program aims to inspire high school students to study science, technology, engineering or mathematics at university.

The program began in 2017, with just two students from Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School. In 2023, the program expanded to 72 students from 18 schools, and planning has begun to expand the program across Australia in the future.

Schools nominate up to four Yr 10 or Yr 11 students, who have a strong interest in STEM subjects, to join the program each year. Over a six month period, the students meet with a leading female STEM professional (five online meetings) to learn about their area of expertise.

Through these interactions, students learn to source and summarise complex scientific information and receive guidance on reading and understanding scientific articles. The program culminates with participants presenting their learnings with to peers at their school, and attending a Celebration event with other participants and mentors.

For more information about the Bionics Institute veski Girls in STEM Mentoring Program, contact veski: https://www.veski.org.au/

Hear from our program participants

Details of the Girls in STEM Mentoring Program

1. 1. In Term 1, your school selects up to four students to take part in the program and nominates a teacher to liaise with the Bionics Institute.
   2. The liaison teacher completes a form, providing a media consent form for each student and indicating which area of STEM the students are interested in.
   3. Students are allocated a mentor based on areas of interest in groups of two or four.
   4. Mentors communicate with their allocated students by email to arrange monthly online mentoring sessions at mutually convenient times from May to September.
   5. Students will be asked to gather information on a specific area of research using Google approximately once a month with the aim of increasing their knowledge over time. Initially, the information will be broad, for example hearing impairment. It will progress on to more detailed information about a specific area, for example cochlear implants. Towards the end of the program, students will be introduced to information about their mentor’s specific area of research.
   6. At the end of the program, each pair will present their learnings in a five-minute PowerPoint presentation at a school assembly or in class during October. Parents, peers and mentors can be invited to attend.

To learn more, take a look at our mentoring guidelines, which includes an example calendar of events for the program.

Learn how the Girls in STEM Mentoring Program works

What time commitment is involved?

• Each month, students will research one topic area on Google and write a one-page summary of their findings in dot point format.
• Mentors will arrange a 20 minute meeting each month online via Zoom or similar to discuss the summaries, give feedback and answer questions.
• Towards the end of the program, mentors will ask students to create a PowerPoint presentation based on their work and discuss real research papers.
• Students give a five-minute presentation in pairs at school assembly or in class, organised by the liaison teacher.
• The Mentors are encouraged to invite the students for a tour of their workplace as an excursion at a mutually convenient time during the program.

Feedback from the Girls in STEM Mentoring Program

Ivanhoe Girls Grammar School teacher testimonial
Our students have been involved with the Bionics Institute for several years and students have relished the opportunity of working in research science with acclaimed female mentors.

Not only have they had experience in laboratories and other research settings their mentors have given a firsthand account of a career for women in science research fields.

Mentors have provided insight all the way from undergraduate entry and experiences, through the process of applying for grants and other funding as well as presenting research findings at conferences. These insights have been invaluable for our students.

In addition, they have enhanced their communication skills, effectively and regularly communicating with their mentors and ultimately presenting their projects to a broad audience.

Former Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School student story
Tara Stewardson was one of the first participants in the inaugural program and she told us how it inspired her to pursue a career in STEM in this case study.

Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School students involved in the Girls in STEM Mentoring Program in 2021 were offered the following STEM courses for study in 2023:

• Animal and Veterinary Biosciences at La Trobe University or Charles Sturt University
• Biomedicine at the University of Melbourne
• Laws (Honours)/Biomedical Science at Monash University
• Nursing/Midwifery at Deakin University
• Physiotherapy at Victoria University or Podiatry (Honours) at La Trobe University
• Science at the University Of Melbourne.

Loreto School news article
Three students from Loreto school describe their experience of the program in this news article on the Loreto website.

Bionics Institute 2022 Girls in STEM celebration event video
The 2022 program culminated in a celebration event with inspiring guest speakers and certificates presented by a Victorian state government MP. Take a look at a recording of the event here: 2022 Girls in STEM celebration event.

A new nerve treatment invented by Melbourne researchers at the Bionics Institute is bringing hope to people with rheumatoid arthritis.

The tiny piece of ground-breaking technology – the size of a thumbnail – could replace drug treatment for thousands of people suffering from pain and inflammation caused by the disease.

Living with rheumatoid arthritis

Karen Morgan, 57, who has lived with rheumatoid arthritis for over 22 years says she will be first in line to test the device when it goes into clinical trials.

She said: “The medication makes the pain bearable most of the time, but when I have a flare up it’s a struggle to do anything.

“Some days my joints are burning hot, stiff and swollen. I find it very hard to walk. I can’t put my car key into the ignition.”

Affecting nearly half a million Australians, rheumatoid arthritis is currently treated using a cocktail of drugs with unpleasant side effects that have severely restricted Karen’s life.

“The medication has pretty much destroyed my immune system. During COVID I’ve had to avoid people most of the time. It’s been awful.”

New treatment brings new hope

Amazingly, this new treatment is being developed by Karen’s niece, Bionics Institute researcher Dr Sophie Payne and her team.

Dr Payne says the battery powered device stimulates a major nerve, called the vagus nerve, with electricity to reboot the body’s built-in healing system.

She said: “In rheumatoid arthritis, the body attacks its own joints causing inflammation, pain and stiffness.

“We’re hoping to take it to clinical trials in just two years,” she said.

Find out more in this interview with Virginia Trioli on ABC and this story in the Herald Sun.

Backed by clinical expertise

Dr Evange Romas, head of the rheumatology unit at St Vincent’s Hospital is working closely with the Bionics Institute team to ensure the device is optimised for his patients.

He says that, in addition to coping with damaging side effects, around 40% of patients stop responding to drug therapy and he is looking forward to the day when he can offer the new vagus nerve device treatment as an alternative.

He said: “I have been involved in some great advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis during my career.

“However, this new treatment is incredibly exciting and I’m doing everything in my power to help the Bionics Institute researchers get it into the clinic for the benefit of my patients as soon as possible.”

A ‘set and forget’ treatment

Bionics Institute CEO, Robert Klupacs says the beauty of the device is that it can be attached to the vagus nerve in the abdomen using keyhole surgery and the battery, which sits under the skin at hip level, only needs to be changed every ten years.

“We’re working towards the day when people with rheumatoid arthritis won’t have to remember to take medication every day and won’t have to cope with side effects.

“They can ‘set and forget’ about this electrical vagus nerve device, leaving their body to do the work for them,” he said.

Every donation towards this research will help the Bionics Institute take the vagus nerve device to clinical trials much more quickly and transform the lives of people like Karen.

About the Bionics Institute

The Bionics Institute is an internationally recognised, independent medical research institute that solves medical challenges with technology. We lead the world in the development of medical devices and therapies to transform the lives of people with a range of conditions from hearing impairment and Parkinsonʼs disease to epilepsy, arthritis and diabetes. The Bionics Institute is a partner in ACMD – Australia’s first hospital-based biomedical engineering research centre located at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne.

Download media release

Did you miss our recent event?

This exciting new nerve treatment was the focus of the Bionics Institute’s recent Rethinking Rheumatoid Arthritis event.

Bionics Institute’s research director Professor James Fallon and lead arthritis researcher Dr Sophie Payne were joined by Dr Evange Romas and specialist in hand therapy Nick Antoniou. To provide their expert insights into the disease and how the ground-breaking new device new device could transform the lives of people living with rheumatoid arthritis.

Watch their individual presentations or full event recording below.

Bionics Institute’s Senior Data Scientist Gautam Balasubramanian joined the Institute in May 2021.

Dr Gautam  Balasubramanian’s primary role is to develop machine learning and signal processing algorithms for Bionics Institute research teams.

For EarGenie™, he is developing detection algorithms for the software system, which provides clinicians with an assessment of the baby’s hearing. That work can then be extended and adapted to apply to other projects.

By applying robust, sophisticated & cutting edge analytics techniques, we can efficiently analyse and extract meaningful outputs from the huge amounts of data collected by our researchers.

‘By developing a similar genre of statistical models we can gradually improve algorithms across many projects. For example, we can apply similar techniques from EarGenie™ to other projects which capture changes in brain activity.’

One of these projects includes tinnitus. Bionics Institute researchers are using the same technology as EarGenie™ to look at how the brain responds to sounds, to develop an objective test for tinnitus. The new test will aid the diagnosis and development of potential treatments.

Gautam also plays a key role in helping the Institute prepare for the future.

By using the latest data science practices learned from his previous roles in the high-tech telecommunications, defence and finance sectors, he is aiming to find common transferable techniques, as well as uniform ways of developing and running analytics projects.

He hopes these could be used to solve problems across various research areas, fostering greater collaboration between teams and enabling faster progression of scientific research, to speed up treatments from the lab to the bedside.

Describing his journey from business to the Bionics Institute, he says that medical research is an area where he can be creative and exercise all aspects of his personality.

He enjoys looking at existing projects and bringing in cutting- edge knowledge from computer science to help advance treatment options available.

He says: ‘I always had a keen interest in health sciences, and even though I may not be a medical professional, I always thought there must be a way I can use my skillset to work on something that can ultimately help people.’

Bionics Institute’s Mica Haneman will be taking part in a triathlon later this year to raise money towards our cochlear implant research.

Mica, an audiology graduate and research assistant with the Bionics Institute’s hearing team was inspired by taking part in our recent Bionics takes on Bogong event and seeing first-hand the difference community funding can make.

“I have the privilege of working with cochlear implant recipients to investigate ways of improving how cochlear implants are programmed.”

“Some people with a cochlear implant still experience many challenges with how sounds and speech are heard.”

“The work the Bionics Institute teams are doing to try and resolve this is so important.”

We’d love to hear your fundraising ideas!

If you’re thinking about setting up a fundraiser for Bionics Institute research, or have any questions about how you can do this, click here to see how you can fundraise for us!

Imagine ringing and hissing in your head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week…

You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. It stops you from working. You just can’t escape this auditory torment.

If you have a really severe case, you may end up with depression… like Deb has.

No matter what you do, you’re trapped and tormented by this noise.

The worst thing is that no scientifically valid test exists to diagnose or measure your tinnitus. This hinders research into effective treatments. Because how can you develop a treatment if you can’t measure whether it works.

But that can now change… with your generous gift. You can help us develop a breakthrough test and silence the torment of tinnitus!

Such a test would make a huge difference to someone like Deb. Her tinnitus got to the stage where life became unbearable.

“It’s like a gas leak in my head. I’ve got multiple layers of hissing… you feel trapped in your head, trapped and tormented.”

“It’s kicked up my anxiety and depression. Every day now is about coping, not living.”

Deb has tried everything to relieve tinnitus – white noise, masking, cognitive behavioural therapy, hearing aids and natural remedies. Nothing has worked.

Deb admits she’s thought about ending her life when tinnitus got really bad. That’s why she believes a proper diagnostic test and treatment is so important… and why your gift today is so vital.

With your support, you can help bring relief to tinnitus sufferers like Deb and your gift will be matched x 2! But you must donate before 30 June or by the time the matched funding runs out…whichever comes first!

The new tinnitus test uses special imaging technology in a brain cap to shine near infrared light onto the head.

This measures changes in blood oxygen levels in your brain when it responds to a sound. It scientifically shows the presence of noise. Our algorithm then analyses this data to identify whether a patient has tinnitus… and how severe it is.

It can diagnose tinnitus with 78% accuracy and distinguish between mild and severe tinnitus with 87% accuracy.

This has never been done before!

Our team has done a magnificent job bringing the test this far. Now your help is needed to conduct further trials and develop an everyday version of the test that doctors can easily use in the clinic.

Did you miss our recent event?

This exciting new test was the focus of the Bionics Institute’s recent event ‘Measuring tinnitus – detecting an invisible condition’.

In our recorded webinar, you’ll learn more about our tinnitus test from senior Bionics Institute researcher Dr Mehrnaz Shoushtarian, and hear from guest speakers Dr Sol Marghzar, doctor of audiology and clinical director of ‘The Hearing Doctor’ in California; Bionics Institute’s Professor James Fallon; and Victoria Didenko, who shares her experience of being diagnosed and living with tinnitus