Chamindie Punyadeera 26th Lorne Cancer Conference 2014

Chamindie Punyadeera

Chamindie Punyadeera, Clinical Biochemist, graduated from the department of Chemical Pathology at the School of Medicine at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in 2001. Her PhD research was aimed at investigating the pathogenesis and clinical manifestation of Type 2 Diabetes and obesity in two ethnically diverse South African population groups. She was awarded the Academic Excellence Scholarship from the University of Witwatersrand to pursue her PhD research. She did a 4-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands in close collaboration with Merck Pharmaceuticals. The research was focused on endometrium physiology and oncology. She has published over 40 research papers, an inventor of 12 patent applications and has delivered key note lectures. She worked as Senior Scientist at the Philips High Technology Research laboratories in the Netherlands till 2008. She led a team of researchers in the development of novel, innovative diagnostic platforms. Currently, she is a group leader at the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute at the Translational Research Institute in Australia and her team focuses on unraveling the diagnostic potential of human saliva for detecting head and neck cancer and heart diseases.