Announcing our 2024 prize winners! Every year, final year PhD candidates present their doctoral studies to the Royal Society of Victoria, competing for four prizes across four categories that recognise excellence in Victoria’s early career scientists. Our eight finalists present under the four categories: Biological Sciences, Biomedical & Health Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Physical Sciences.

Working adaptively with fire as a tool for ecological health can help us to prevent the extinction of flora species across Victoria’s ecosystems. Ella Plumanns Pouton (University of Melbourne/Deakin University) works to understand how fire regimes support different plants across their whole life cycle, providing a vital scientific foundation for fire management practices that respond to the unfolding global biodiversity crisis.

Making sense of the relationship of different hominin species in South Africa has always been challenging, largely because of issues dating them accurately. New methods developed by Dr Wenjing Yu open the possibility of the A. africanus species could be older than originally thought – older than the skeleton widely regarded as the first human, ‘Lucy’ (A. afarensis).

One of the issues with current bionic vision devices is off-target stimulation. The electrical stimulation used to activate cells in the retina tends to spread, leading to inadvertent broad activation and poor visual acuity. As such, developing alternative stimulation methods to deliver greater spatial precision – like optogenetics – are considered invaluable for vision restoration.

Cancer cells have ways to avoid destruction by displaying proteins on their surface that turn off the body’s immune cells, or adopting genetic changes to make them less visible to the immune system, or interfering with how the immune system responds to cancer cells in other ways. Immunotherapy helps the immune system overcome these hurdles to better fight cancer.