ProfessorNicholas Buckley

Project Opportunities

Title: NHMRC Translational Australian Clinical Toxicology (TACT) Program

Summary of opportunity:

A range of PhD research project opportunities in human toxicology exist within the TACT program. We are looking for talented and motivated doctoral candidates, with or without a primary scholarship, who are not afraid of a challenge. You may have a research idea of your own or you may like to take up one of the topics currently being investigated by TACT. While TACT does not normally provide full scholarship funding, a top-up scholarship opportunity exists within the TACT program for candidates with a primary scholarship.

If you have:
• a relevant undergraduate or master's degree and met the institutional requirements for enrolment in a doctoral candidature at one of the program's research centres;
• knowledge of one or more of the following disciplines: medicine, pharmacy, psychology, pharmacology, epidemiology, statistics, biostatistics;
• demonstrated skills in one or more of the following areas: epidemiological methods, quantitative analysis, data management, outcomes measurement.
• A strong desire to contribute to improvement of health outcomes through rigorous evidence-based research
We'd like to hear from you.

Opportunity synopsis:

TACT Program is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between enthusiastic, highly dedicated and internationally recognised researchers both in Australia and overseas. Our key goal is to integrate the clinical, epidemiological and laboratory research in human toxicology in order to provide a rapid and flexible response to a range of human toxicology problems. We have established the two largest clinical cohort studies on poisoning in the world and collaborate with the Poisons Information Centre. These enable us to conduct population based studies into poisoning and its treatments.
Our four core themes are:

• Improved detection of emerging toxicological issues in humans
• Understanding toxicological mechanisms behind differential toxicity in humans
• Improved management of clinical toxicological problems
• Rapid translation of new findings into regulation, policy and clinical practice

• Determine all the drugs that are over-represented in poisonings in Australia (poisonings/prescription or poisonings/person).
• Determine all drugs/chemicals that have a high case-fatality (death/poisoning) or high chronic morbidity on deliberate or occupational/environmental exposure relative to other agents in their drug/chemical-class or used for the same indication
• Define the clinical effects in overdose of all new psychotropic drugs in Australia, including identifying any implications for safe use in therapeutic doses.
• Determine the mechanisms that explain any important differences in relative toxicity
• Provide evidence on effects in excessive doses of all new agents in Australia with expected dose-related toxicity (e.g oral anticoagulants) and explore the optimal treatments.
• Refine the treatment of our most common toxicology problems in Australia/Asia (e.g. snakebite, paracetamol, agrochemicals, psychotropics), especially where the current clinical strategy is unclear or where patient treatment may be unnecessarily prolonged
• Using observed safe and toxic acute and chronic exposures in patients, validate or otherwise levels predicted in the regulatory approval of various drugs/chemicals using animal studies
• Relate drug and chemical toxicity to their exposure by different routes in human and in animals, e.g. oral, inhalational and dermal dosing and administration method