The 2006 Boomerang Award: Danny Hatters

Danny Hatters Danny's research career began in 1996 with his BSc (Hons) year under the supervision of Dr Ed Newbigin and Dr Bing Liu in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne. He purified and partially sequenced isoforms of S-RNase from flower stigmas involved in self-incompatibility in sexual reproduction and developed basic skills in protein purification, DNA cloning, and plant genotyping. After graduation, Danny became a Research Assistant with Dr Geoff Howlett in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne. He expressed and purified human apolipoprotein (apo) C-II from bacteria and learnt the tools of the trade for biophysical studies associated with investigating protein-protein and protein-lipid interactions. During his work he found that apoC-II formed amyloid-like fibrils similar to those associated with certain neurological and rare inherited amyloidosesrelated diseases. This provoked his interest in the potential role of apoC-II amyloid formation in disease, which was pursued as a PhD project beginning in late 1998 under the supervision of Dr Howlett and Dr William Sawyer. Danny explored how parameters, including ligand binding, chaperones and macromolecular crowding mediate the formation and structure of apoC-II fibers. For three months in 2000, Danny went to Oxford in the UK to work with Dr Chris Dobson and Dr Carol Robinson, world leaders in their respective fields of protein folding and mass spectrometry. In 2000, Danny was awarded the Young Biophysicist Award for the Australian Society for Biophysics.

In 2002, Danny went to the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco for a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Dr Karl Weisgraber, a leading researcher of the structural and functional properties of the three isoforms of apoE that are associated with profoundly different risks for Alzheimer's disease. Using fluorescence and electron paramagnetic spectroscopies, Danny identified distinct conformational differences between the isoforms and also discovered how differences in conformational stability among the three isoforms profoundly influences the behaviour of apoE. In 2005, Danny was awarded a John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation fellowship and was promoted to Research Scientist at the Gladstone. In early 2006, Danny received a Young Investigator Award at the Annual Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function. Danny is now aiming to return home to Australia next year and plans to use his Boomerang Award to travel to Adelaide and Melbourne after the ComBio meeting in Brisbane to present seminars and visit investigators at the University of Adelaide, Bio21/University of Melbourne and Monash University.

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This page last modified: July 31, 2006.