STAN PERRON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AWARDS GRANTS TO PROPEL GROUNDBREAKING HEALTH RESEARCH ACROSS WESTERN AUSTRALIA

 

The Stan Perron Charitable Foundation announces new grants supporting research into health, wellbeing and disadvantage across Western Australia.

The Foundation will fund several innovative research projects being undertaken in Western Australia as part of its latest round of Health Research Grants.

The Foundation’s Board of Directors review each round of applications in collaboration with a panel of medical and scientific experts who work to identify initiatives that align with the Foundation’s funding guidelines. The Foundation prioritises funding applications that tackle the causes of health problems, build research capacity within Western Australia and are most likely to significantly improve young Western Australians’ health and wellbeing.

Applicants for the Foundation’s Health Research Grants are eligible for funding in one of three sub-categories: People and Platforms, Programs and Partnerships or the Starter Grants Program.

People and Platforms grants are designed to support researchers, as well as platforms that provide the infrastructure needed to activate an important activity in any scientific or health-related discipline.

Programs and Partnership grants are delivered over periods of up to five years and support major, collaborative research projects, particularly those receiving funding from other sources and are likely to enhance Western Australia’s research capacity. Partnership grants centre on collaborations between researchers and across institutions and may be awarded to individual projects or programs.

The Starter Grants Program is designed to assist researchers in their early careers.

The initiatives funded through the most recent round of People and Platforms grants include:

  • Food environment interventions to improve children’s nutritional health

  • Finding new ways to prevent Rheumatic Heart Disease in children

  • Enhancing airway repair to prevent respiratory deterioration in children with asthma

  • Improving clinical care by identifying how sex hormones change the immune system

  • Harnessing machine learning and proteomics to develop sepsis point-of-care diagnostics for children

  • Scaling up interventions to support young people waiting for specialist mental health services

  • Improving the health of Western Australian children through better birth-days

  • Understanding and improving the health and development of children with incarcerated mothers

  • Addressing the impacts of homelessness upon children across the first 1,000 days of life

  • Preventing deep and persistent disadvantage, reducing mental health problems in young people, and improving the health, education, community and justice outcomes for Aboriginal children and families in Western Australia

  • Exploring diagnosis and treatment pathways for metabolic diseases in Western Australian children

  • Developing advanced training modules to support consumer and community involvement in health research

  • Enhancing the ORIGINS platform, a decade-long longitudinal study exploring the origins of chronic physical and mental health problems

  • Maintaining and developing the IDEA (Intellectual Disability Exploring Answers) Database

  • Using advanced data analytics to improve perioperative outcomes for children and young people.

In addition, the Foundation approved four Programs and Partnerships initiatives, including:

A/Prof Anthony Kicic (Telethon Kids Institute, Curtin University)

Establishing a novel therapeutics pipeline to treat antibiotic resistant infections in children

A/Prof Hannah Moore (Telethon Kids Institute, Curtin University)

The STAMP (Surveillance-Transmission-Attitudes-Modelling and Policy) RSV Program

Dr Simon Erickson (WA Child and Adolescent Health Service)

FOOTPRINTS: Follow-On Outreach: Psychosocial Support for Acutely Bereaved Families in Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)

A/Prof Kathryn Modecki (Telethon Kids Institute on behalf of the Centre for Child Health Research, The University of Western Australia)

Every moment counts: looking backwards and looking forwards to improve youth mental health

A complete list of the recipients supported by the 2023 Health Research Grants program can be found here.


Published: January 2024

 
Megan Putland