Professor Chamindie Punyadeera

Saliva Biomarkers (Griffith University)

PhD (University of The Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Professor at Griffith University

Associate Professor Chamindie Punyadeera, Clinical Chemist, graduated from the Department of Chemical Pathology, 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, ischemic heart disease and obesity. She was also awarded the Academic Excellence Scholarship from the University of Witwatersrand as well as the South African Medical Research Endowment Funds. During her PhD study, she spent couple of months in the Laboratory of Professor Alan Jackson at the Institute of Human Nutrition at the University of Southampton, UK to investigate lipid metabolism in South African women using stable isotopes. 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, steroid hormone pharmacokinetics and oncology. She worked at Royal Philips Electronics at the High Technology Campus in the Netherlands as a senior scientist and led a project team on biosensor development and biomarker discovery. She has published over 50 research papers, 13 PCT patents and has reviewed papers for international journals and has delivered key note lectures. She has presented at major international conferences. She lead a research team at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia developing non-invasive and minimally invasive technology platforms to better human health outcomes in the 21st Century. She is now working as a Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane.

Discipline

Oncology and Carcinogenesis, Medical Biochemistry and Metabolomics, Microbiology

Specific Field of Expertise

Head and Neck Cancers, Cancer Biology, Biomarker Discovery, Circulating Tumour Cells and Cell-Free DNA, Saliva Diagnostics, Obesity, Cardiovascular Diseases, Type 2 Diabetes, Endometriosis,  Steroid Hormone Regulation, Proteomics, Glycosylation, Epigenetics and Genomics.