Professor Alicia Dennis and Dr Prasanti Kotagiri awarded Fulbright Scholarships

Professor Alicia Dennis from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Department of Critical Care and Dr Prasanti Kotagiri from the Department of Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital have been awarded Fulbright Scholarships. Professor Dennis and Dr Kotagiri received the Future Scholarship and the New Australian Scholarship respectively.

Professor Alicia Dennis Dr Prasanti Kotagiri

Professor Alicia Dennis (left) from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Department of Critical Care and Dr Prasanti Kotagiri (right) from the Department of Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Professor Dennis will use her scholarship to support the Hopeful Hearts project at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School in the United States. The project will create a collaborative platform to advance understanding of the mechanisms of high blood pressure (using heart ultrasound) in people with preeclampsia.

Dr Kotagiri will use her scholarship to collaborate with researchers from Cambridge and Stanford University who are working to understand the changes that occur in the immune system with age that render it less equipped to contain infections or respond to vaccinations.

Professor Alicia Dennis:

Professor Dennis is an obstetric anaesthesiologist and is the first Director of Anaesthesia Research at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Parkville. As a clinician researcher, and following on from her PhD work using heart ultrasound in the high blood pressure condition of preeclampsia in pregnant people, she leads a unique program of obstetric cardiac research in people with preeclampsia. Alicia has academic appointments at The University of Melbourne and Deakin University and has held an NHMRC Fellowship in obstetric perioperative medicine. She has been awarded the President’s Medal from the Australian Society of Anaesthetists for extraordinary service to the Society.

Dr Prasanti Kotagiri:

Dr Prasanti Kotagiri is a nephrologist and early career researcher with a strong interest in B cell immunology. On completion of her renal specialist training, she undertook a PhD at Cambridge University in Professor Ken Smith’s laboratory. Her work involved studying the immune cell transcriptome and B cell receptor repertoire in autoimmunity, infection, and vaccination. Since relocating to Melbourne, she has continued collaborating with Cambridge University, utilising her skills in big data analysis to study the effects of ageing on the immune system. She has been appointed as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne.

Read more: https://www.fulbright.org.au/current-scholars/