SAIC final technical report : SurveyMonkey

The report features findings in relation to “Understanding non-violent male identities for safe and inclusive cities.” Urban violence and criminality are intertwined with gender identities, sexuality and violence. Young men, disempowered by unemployment and poverty, seek ways to affirm their male identities. Findings showed the main drivers of joining criminal activities was to have access to girls and women, to impress women, and to compete with men. Young men seek older women who have a house and family, to reach the status of socially recognized manhood. The impact of trauma on gender identity construction is the strongest factor to predict use of violence at all levels of society: individual, family and community. The research indicates some clear suggestions for policy change

Making the case for constitutional reform

Recent discussions on whether or not to amend the Australian Constitution to ‘recognise’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are important and long overdue for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Federation in 1901 meant the loss of rights and freedoms for Indigenous Australians when the Constitution was made. Today, even after the changes brought about by the 1967 referendum, Australia is still the only democratic nation in the world with a Constitution with clauses that authorise discrimination on the basis of race (Davis & William 2015). Indeed, sub-section 51 of the Constitution allows the Commonwealth to make laws for the people of any race for whom they deem necessary, and section 25 allows the Commonwealth to disqualify individuals from voting because of their race. These disgraceful aspects of the Constitution have allowed such negative and damaging interferences in Indigenous Communities as the Howard government’s ‘Northern Territory Intervention’. Like Davis, I believe it is unacceptable for Australia as a modern liberal democracy to have a ‘race power’ in the Constitution (Davis 2008, p. 8), and so to eradicate that inequity, there must be a Constitutional amendment as well as a treaty put in place

Multiparametric characterisation of peripheral immunity in recipients of checkpoint immunotherapy across a large patient cohort

Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has revolutionised the treatment of metastatic melanoma (MM) which was historically resistant to conventional therapies, yet only a minority of patients experience durable clinical benefit. Dissecting peripheral immune responses to ICB may discern predictive markers of clinical outcome. However, infection with human cytomegalovirus (CMV) can have profound effects on immunity and the extent to which this affects the peripheral immune response to ICB is unclear. Using an agnostic transcriptomic and cytometric assessment of peripheral immune ICB responses across a large cohort of MM patients, I identify dynamic changes in immune composition, activation and adaptive immune cell repertoires. I also determine the contribution of CMV to these changes and describe predictors of clinical outcome. Firstly, I identify CD8+ T-cells as being the most responsive cell type to ICB treatment and that responses in other peripheral blood mononuclear cell subsets are secondary to CD8+ T-cell ICB response. Next, I find that only B-cell proportion and subset composition are sensitive to ICB treatment. This includes a transient depletion of B-cells and an induction of antibody-secreting cells which associate with clinical outcome. I then characterise these changes and determine that these ICB-mediated effects are largely dependent on CD8+ T-cell activation and production of B-cell chemoattractant CXCL13. Finally, I describe the effects of ICB and CMV on corresponding B-cell receptor and T-cell receptor repertoires. Significantly, I find that B-cells undergo accelerated class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation following ICB, whilst MAIT cells are depleted and associate with clinical outcome. Although CMV infection is a major determinant of MAIT cell changes following ICB, all other identified ICB-mediated effects are independent of CMV serostatus. In this thesis I present novel findings surrounding B-cell and T-cell responses to ICB treatment and identify predictive markers which may have clinical utility in monitoring patient treatment responses as well as guiding treatment stratification. My observations demonstrate that the response to ICB is multifaceted, involving a coordinated interaction between different cell subsets, driven by CD8+ T-cells. Notably, B-cells cannot be assumed to play a bystander role and my work highlights the importance of B-cell:CD8+ T-cell interactions in the response to ICB and long-term clinical benefit

It's A Wrap

Collaborative Inclusive Performance “It’s a Wrap” directed by Alice Fox of the learning-disabled RocketArtist Studios. Throughout the collaborative, inclusive creation of the performance we employed Alice’s research on practices for working inclusively with vulnerable people with learning disabilities through performance