A generous travel award is helping three Kolling Institute researchers broaden their experience and develop closer international partnerships.

Kelly McKelvey and Yaser Gholami from the Bill Walsh Translational Cancer Research Lab and Bryony Winters from the Pain Management Research Institute will share in close to $20,000 after receiving the Beryl and Jack Jacobs Travel Award.

It’s an initiative to support early to mid-career researchers by funding their travel and education expenses.

Yaser Gholami will spend two months at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, preparing for the clinical translation of a new technology to help the early diagnosis and treatment of cancers which have metastasised within the lymph nodes.

"The aim of the project is to complete phase II of our animal studies ahead of the first human clinical study in Australia,’’ Yaser said.

"I’m really pleased to be leading one of the first trials in Australia using new nanotechnology for cancer imaging and therapy."

Kelly McKelvey will use the travel award to attend the International Congress of Radiation Research in Manchester in August. Kelly will also visit brain cancer research labs at The University of Manchester and The University of Leeds.

"I’m looking forwarding to formalising our international partnerships with UK institutions and extending our experience with the Small Animal Radiation Research Platform," Kelly said.

The travel award will also enable Bryony Winters to attend the international conference Pharmacology 2019 in Edinburgh in December.

"The trip will give me the chance to meet world-leading neuroscientists and pharmacologists, and establish a long term research partnership looking at epigenetic links between stress and chronic pain,’’ she said.

"The links are very complex and I hope to be able to extend Kolling’s cutting edge research in this area through this collaboration."