 I'd like to introduce Melanie Ridgway. Melanie's from the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and the Environment. And the title of Melanie's thesis talk tonight is Sexist Science at the Apocalypse. Bad news, the world is ending. Pollution has poisoned the drinking water and extreme heat waves are increasingly frequent. The world your body has adapted to is now a hostile place you can't survive in. What are you gonna do? I'm thinking let's run as far away as possible. Or you know what, even better, let's just make the most of what little time we have left. Well, that's what a malaria parasite would be thinking anyway. So malaria parasites mostly live inside human red blood cells. Your body naturally induces a fever to get rid of them, which is like global warming for the malaria parasite. You can also treat malaria with drugs which poison the parasite. When faced with such a stressful situation, the malaria parasite can decide to escape the human through a mosquito feeding on the blood. The mosquito is like an oasis for the parasite where anything is possible. And by that I mean where it can have sex. So when the parasite decides to escape the human, it also dedicates the rest of its life to sex. So I study how the malaria parasite prepares to leave the human body and to have sex. In other words, I study the purity of the malaria parasite. Unlike previous politically correct studies, I take a sexist approach and look at what happens differently in the males and females. So the first step of my research is separating these microscopic parasites. Even for experts, it's difficult to spot the difference, let alone separate them. But fortunately, I work with female parasites that have a green spot that I've scientifically referred to as the G spot. Based on this female specific characteristic, I've taught a machine to single out the female parasites from the male parasites. And then I can analyze what happens differently in the males and females during puberty. Are they stopped piling fats to sustain their escape journey? Are they accumulating protein as they grow stronger? And what parts of the DNA instruction manual are they reading to study up on life in the mosquito? By better understanding how the malaria parasite tries to escape the human and to have sex, we can design treatments to prevent this happening and ultimately stop the apocalyptic spread of malaria.