Return to Dunedin
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February
2008 will see Jean Fleming back in New Zealand, after three
years in the prawn and parrot paradise of Brisbane as a part-time contract
academic teaching reproduction and physiology at Griffith University. Jean is
returning to the University of Otago, Dunedin, as a Professor of Science
Communication, with 50% of her time spent in her former Department of Anatomy &
Structural Biology. This is a dream job for her, helping to establish the new
Centre of Science Communication, manage the annual Hands-on Science summer
programme and the University’s contribution to the International Science
Festival and supervise students in a new Masters of Science Communication
degree.
Jean leaves Griffith University before Christmas, but has established several
good collaborations and many friendships there and will remain connected through
an Adjunct Professorship. Jean is grateful to the women of the School of
Biomolecular & Physical Sciences (BPS), especially Sarah Ashmore, who showed her
the ropes and shared many laughs over the past three years. Jean has also
enjoyed collaborating with Christine Wells, an energetic bioinformatician and
molecular biologist in the BPS, whose interests include inflammation and
macrophage cell biology. She and Jean work on the control of expression of the
activin-ßC and –ßE genes in mouse and human tissues. Jean’s other research
focuses on how repeated ovulation increases a woman’s risk of developing
epithelial ovarian cancer, by contributing to ovarian inclusion cyst formation.
Jean will continue these studies in the Department of Anatomy & Structural
Biology at Otago and hopes to continue her collaborations with Georgia Chenevix-Trench’s
laboratory at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and her attendance at
kConFab conferences.
Jean’s partner Grant will stay on in Brisbane, so there will be regular trips
back across the Tasman. She will miss much about Brisbane and glorious
Queensland, including her early morning walks in the local park, with a dawn
chorus of lorikeets, galahs, sulphurcrested cockatoos, butcher birds and fig
birds, all enjoying the last remnants of the cool night, before the sun’s heat
penetrates. She has wonderful memories of kayaking trips on Moreton Bay, with
pelicans and turtles and, once, a rare and shy dugong sharing the turquoise
water. Christmas dinner will never be the same, feasting on prawns and barbecued
octopus after a day keeping cool in the sea. And who could forget walking on a
moonlit beach, phosphorescence around our feet in the water and a silent
lightning display out over the ocean.