 Hi everyone, I'm Jessica Buck and I'm an alumni of the University of Newcastle. I grew up on the Central Coast on Dark and Young and Awabical Country and my family is from the Camilla Roy Nation in Central New South Wales. When I was little I was always really interested in health and disease. I used to wrap my little brother up in bandages and I used to read my mum's first aid textbooks for fun. But funnily enough I was never that interested in becoming a doctor. I was always more interested in how diseases worked and how treatments could be used to make people better. I started my journey at the University of Newcastle in 2010 where I enrolled in a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and alongside that I also completed a Diploma in Languages majoring in Japanese. I find the topic of health and disease really fascinating. So I had actually a really hard time deciding what topic I wanted to choose for my further research and I was torn between neuroscience which is the study of the brain and oncology which is the study of cancer. And actually one of my friends suggested to me a little bit tongue in cheek that I combined it to and study brain cancer and that stuck and so that's what I've built my research career on so far. I was accepted into the Masters of Neuroscience program at Oxford University and I was lucky enough to receive a Charlie Perkins Scholarship and an Oxford Australia Scholarship for my studies. I really enjoyed the program and I loved my time in Oxford so I decided to apply for a PhD as well. For my PhD I worked with Professor Nicola Simpson in the Department of Oncology and what my research was was I studied the best ways to use MRI which is magnetic resonance imaging to study cancer that has spread to the brain and that's called brain metastasis. My PhD research was really interesting and that was definitely what got me hooked on brain cancer. After my PhD I wanted to come back to Australia to continue my research career and I was fortunate to be awarded a Forest Fellowship so now I am working as a postdoc tool researcher at the University of Western Australia and the Telethon Kids Institute. I'm a part of the brain tumour team in the Telethon Kids Cancer Centre where I work with Dr Raylene Endersby and Dr Nick Gattato. Childhood brain cancer kills more Australian children than any other disease. In other childhood cancers like leukemia there's been a number of breakthroughs and now more than 90% of children survive. For childhood brain cancer however there has been no new treatments developed in the last 25 years and the treatments that do exist cause a huge amount of damage to the developing brain leaving these kids with long-term side effects for the rest of their lives. My research focuses on the most common type of childhood brain cancer called medulloblastoma and in particular two very aggressive subtypes of this disease. The mission of my lab is to increase the number of kids who survive brain cancer and to increase the quality of life for those who do. With so many new drugs that might show potential for treating cancer, how do we work out which ones are going to work in kids with medulloblastoma? We don't want to risk putting kids in clinical trials with a new drug that isn't going to work. Our research lab tests new combinations of drugs pre-clinically using a state-of-the-art technique called patient-derived xenocrafts. This allows us to test drugs pre-clinically quickly and efficiently making sure that only treatment combinations that are likely to work make it through to clinical trials. Now when new treatments move into clinical trials they are never tested alone but always in combination with the current standard of care. So when we do our pre-clinical testing we need to make sure not only does our drug work but that it works better than the current standard of care and so to do this we test our new drugs in combination with normal chemotherapy or in combination with radiotherapy. My work in particular looks at what kind of drugs we can combine with radiotherapy and to study this the Telephone Kids Institute has acquired Australia's first pre-clinical radiotherapy machine and so this allows us to give clinical style doses and clinical style radiotherapy in a pre-clinical setting and it's a really exciting machine that has allowed us to make a lot of leaps in terms of combining new drugs with radiotherapy. By combining new drugs with radiotherapy we hope to increase survival for children with high risk medulloblastoma but we can also use this technique in children with low risk brain cancers. Radiotherapy is really damaging to the normal brain especially in kids and so we hope to use radio sensitising drugs to reduce the amount of radiotherapy we give which would help reduce the lifelong side effects that these kids suffer. Now I'm only just starting out in my research career but there's no doubt that my undergrad in biomedical science at the University of Newcastle definitely set me up for a research career so I'd like to give a big shout out to the Wallachooker Institute and the University of Newcastle for helping me to achieve my dreams. Thank you.