 My job as a group leader, I guess, is to see the strategic way forward, to decide which areas to follow, to put in grant applications for funding, hopefully receive funding to follow those leads, but it's also very important for a group leader to mentor the next generation of scientists who are coming through the lab and I think that that's one thing that's really important in Australian science because we're really quite small is to identify promising young scientists who could go on to be the next generation. Interestingly, my training was in zoology and genetics, which is a long way from where I've ended up, but nevertheless my interest is in physiology so I guess I probably could be labelled a physiologist. I'm certainly interested in the way that the body works, how organs work and in the lab though we use a range of different techniques to look at this so where we use anatomy, we need to see what's happening inside tissues, we use various physiological techniques to look at the way lab vessels work. We try to do our experiments in as normal a situation as close to physiological conditions as possible so I guess you could say I'm a physiologist. I actually work in a neuroscience department so I have an interest in neuroscience as well. Group studies vascular function and this is important from the viewpoint that cardiovascular disease is number one killer in Australia and overseas and hypertension is the major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and hypertension itself is a multifaceted issue and many different sort of treatments are used for it but what isn't probably well known is that about 30 odd percent of hypertensive patients actually are resistant to the current therapies so our interest is in looking for potential therapeutic targets for those people so basically our lab works on blood vessel function and by studying blood vessel function in normal animals, normal mice and also in animal models of cardiovascular disease we hope to be able to elucidate mechanisms that might have gone awry in cardiovascular disease. To me the most exciting thing about research is the element of discovery. Of course you know every day isn't a day of discovery there's lots of tedium in between times just as there is in other professions but I think the ability to be able to follow a hypothesis and follow a lead is really quite a blessing as far as a career goes.