Jane-Louise Lampard Wins Scholarship

Fri, 25 Jun 10

Congratulations to Jane-Louise Lampard B Sc (Hons1) who has won the prestigious Nancy Millis PhD Scholarship for 2010.

The Nancy Millis PhD Scholarship is awarded annually and has been established in honour of Emeritus Professor Nancy Millis AC MBE, former Chair of the CRC for Water Quality and Treatment.

Professor Millis is a microbiologist of international repute who has made enormous contributions in agriculture, environmental protection, medicine and engineering. She was only the fourth woman to be appointed as Professor at the University of Melbourne, with her achievements recognised with the award of a personal chair in 1982. From 1980 to 2000 Professor Millis chaired the Federal Government's genetic engineering surveillance committees (RDMC and GMAC) which established guidelines that have become models for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. As a researcher, she led the field in the early awareness of the importance of clean water and developed techniques to treat industrial wastewater.

Jane-Louise Lampard is a research assistant at the Smart Water Research Centre at Griffith University. She attained her Bachelor of Business (Management)/Bachelor of Science (Public Health) from the University of the Sunshine Coast, which included advanced units in Environmental Epidemiology and Health-related Environmental Microbiology at the University of Kuopio, Finland.

While completing her Honours in Environmental Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Jane-Louise was the winner of a WQRA Summer Scholarship, which she completed with Smart Water under the supervision of Associate Professor Heather Chapman, Dr Frederic Leusch and Dr Anne Roiko.

Jane-Louise's honours research involved conducting a screening level risk assessment of the human health hazards associated with the constructed lake system in Chancellor Park Estate on the Sunshine Coast.

In this research, she sought to characterise the range of chemical, biological, physical and psycho-social hazards; potential routes of exposure; self-reported behaviours of residents influencing levels of exposure; and the risks inherent to the Chancellor Park constructed lake system.

Water-related human health risks have become a primary area of interest for Jane-Louise after being involved in several projects in this area.

The WQRA Summer Scholarship Project was Jane-Louise's first introduction to the human health issues associated with wastewater reclamation. This project highlighted for her the very low level of exposure there is to contaminants from recycled water consumption compared to other sources such as food. It also highlighted the challenges risk communicators face in bridging the gap between perceived risk and actual risk and firmly consolidated her desire to continue working in the human health area of water research, with her particular interest being pathogens and the risk to human health.

Jane-Louise will commence her PhD on human health risks associated with stormwater harvesting and reuse in Semester 2 of 2010.