 Well, I'm very pleased and very excited to receive this award from the Brain Foundation. I'd like to thank you all very much and the donors who made it possible. I'm really excited to tackle this question because it addresses the worst kind of problem, which is a problem that people believe has already been solved. So let me explain what I mean by that. So to start with I'd like to acknowledge that it is widely supposed that Tasmanians are a bit slow and that we frequently have two heads. But what's not quite so widely known as the reason behind that and the reason is that Tasmania soil is very poor and deficient in iodine. And that's a problem that the native Tasmanian solved by having a diet that's rich in seaweed and shellfish, which naturally supplements them with iodine. But when European settlers arrived in Tasmania, the vegetables and the livestock that they raised on this iodine poor soil were lacking in this essential nutrient. And what that has is both metabolic endocrine consequences, and so people develop enlarged thyroid glands of goiter, which can frequently enlarge to the size of one's head. And also has profound implications for developing babies because of the role of thyroid hormone, which depends on iodine levels, in the development of the brain. And in extreme cases, this leads to a syndrome known as cretinism, which is a lifelong cognitive dysfunction and sensory processing deficits. So in the 1970s and the 1980s, people began to understand and really unpick the role of iodine during gestational development. And this was a problem that appeared to be solved. And so iodine supplementation has greatly reduced the incidence of cretinism amongst the millions of people across Southeast Asia who lived in naturally iodine poor regions and who experienced a large number of cretinism in the in the live birth population. But sorry. So the problem appeared to have been solved. And in Tasmania, we iodized the salt and we put iodine in the bread. And even the iodine and the disinfectants that were used in dairy farms added a substantial iodine load to the milk supply as well. And so Tasmanians were iodine replete and the problems appeared to go away and everything was good. But then they stopped using iodine-based disinfectant in dairies and for a period of time in the 1990s before it was mandatory to put iodine in bread. It was possible for people to eat a healthy diet and to have only just barely enough iodine to get by just based on the normal levels that were found in food. And this is okay if you're not pregnant. But when you're pregnant, your need for iodine rises and a population which is mostly okay for the level of iodine in the food it can have or can mask levels of mild iodide deficiency among the pregnant population. And this is actually quite widespread in Australia. So in Western Sydney and in parts of Victoria, it's been documented that many expecting mothers have a mild level of iodine deficiency. And because we know that severe iodine deficiency affects the brain, it became logical to look for deficits in the offspring of these pregnancies. And my colleagues John Burgess and Kristen Hines from the Menzies and the Royal Hobart Hospital looked at a cohort of mothers who came through that period of mild deficiency and have been tracking their offspring since. And it turns out there is a long-term consequence. So these kids are now 13 years old and they've been tracked through their schooling and the results of their standardized testing for nap land and other academic tests have been evaluated and they appear to have a mild but persistent and consistent deficit in language processing. And that seems to be about 10% on things like language comprehension and spelling and things like that. And it's held up again at more detailed testing that they've received at the age of 13. So it seems like there is actually a problem there that we were unaware of. And when I heard about this research, I suddenly thought to myself, well, I know a protein which is essential in the functioning of the auditory system whose expression is regulated by thyroid hormone. And thyroid hormone depends, of course, on the level of iodine that's present during pregnancy. And so we believe that the neurofilament protein, which is an essential structural component of the fast signalling fibres in the brain, and therefore important in sensory processing and perhaps the building blocks from which we develop language is going to be profoundly affected by even a mild deficiency in iodine during pregnancy. And so the work that the Brain Foundation has chosen to support is going to establish a model of not severe iodine deficiency, but mild deficiency in laboratory mice. And we're going to look at the offspring to study the expression of this protein, to look at the ultra structure of the fine fibres in their brain, and lastly to test them for sensory deficits. Because if we can establish that body of evidence, then we can go to the Australian public and we can say it's essential that you get proper iodine nutrition during pregnancy. Because this is a hidden blight that might be preventing our children from achieving what they can at school and throughout the rest of their lives. So I think this is a very important first step in establishing the genuine biological underpinning of what might be a hidden problem among Australia's children. So thank you very much for giving us this award.