Professor EmeritusJill Trewhella

BSc (Hons 1), MSc, PhD, FLANL, FAAAS, FNSSA, Dist FRSN

Jill Trewhella is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah.

Jill earned her BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics and Physics (UNSW) and a PhD in Chemistry (University of Sydney) before moving to the USA for 25 years where she completed post doctoral studies at Yale before taking a research appointment at the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. At Los Alamos she became the first woman Laboratory Fellow, an honour given to < 2% of the research faculty for contributions to science and she also held significant leadership positions while pursuing her research. She was the founding Leader of the multi-disciplinary Bioscience Division at Los Alamos, with more than 300 researchers working on projects such as the Human Genome Project, Structural Genomics of TB, the international HIV AIDS Gene Data Base, and stewarding National Institutes of Health research resources for flow cytometry and stable isotopes.

Jill Left Los Alamos in 2004 to spend a year at the University of Utah before deciding to return to Australia in 2005 having been awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. This award recognized her international standing in the field of structural biology for contributions to our understanding of the molecular communication underpinning healthy function, with a particular emphasis on heart muscle proteins.

In 2009 Jill was appointed deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research, and in that role she oversaw the establishment of multiple enterprise wide systems for research data collection and analysis, and to support research applications and reporting. She also oversaw the development of major collaborative, cross-disciplinary research programs with supporting infrastructure, including the Charles Perkins Centre that focuses on solutions for individuals and communities for the problems arising from the increasing incidence of obesity.

Jill was awarded the Swedish Research Council's prestigious Tage Erlander Visiting Professorship, which she took up in 2015, spending significant time in Sweden at Lund, Linköping and Uppsala Universities during 2015-2017 assisting researchers in their plans to use new landmark facilities for X-ray and neutron studies of biomolecules. She was appointed Professor Emerita upon taking up her Tage Erlander appointment, and since her time in Sweden, she has returned to her bases at the University of Sydney and University of Utah to continue her research, with a focus on the establishment of publication standards and validation tools in her field of structural biology.