Meet the 2024 Elizabeth Blackburn Awardee - Professor Helen Marshall AM

Professor Helen Marshall AM from the University of Adelaide and the Women's and Children's Health Network received the 2024 Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award in Public Health (Leadership). We spoke to Professor Marshall about her path to a career in research and her work on meningococcal disease prevention.

Video transcript

Professor Helen Marshall 0:00
I'm Professor Helen Marshall from the University of Adelaide and the Women's and Children's Health Network in South Australia, and it is such an honour to receive the Elizabeth Blackburn Award. What an amazing trailblazer as a woman scientist - someone that's had incredible impact. A Nobel Prize winner but also I love the fact that she was a real advocate for women to have both a career and a family. You didn't have to choose between the two. You could do both quite successfully. For young people coming into the research arena, I think the most important thing is to find something you're really passionate about. If you're passionate, it will be obvious in the way you try and drive your research, the way you write for grants, the way you write your papers. That will shine through and everything will just follow. And you'll really enjoy a research career. The thing I suggest is to try and take risks, but really calculated risks. I'm not a risk taker, but I've learnt that I don't need to fear failure - that most of the time I will be successful. So that encourages me to take the smaller risks - not safety risks, but risks that I might fail, and that really leads to a successful research career. I'd say, two major events during my lifetime that have had a big impact on me and really focused my research on meningococcal disease prevention. And that was seeing children in my medical elective in Western Samoa. Lots of children with infectious diseases who were severely unwell with meningitis, with pneumonia, and the importance of vaccination and treatment for children with infectious diseases that you don't always have in low and middle resource countries, as opposed to Australia, where we have a very strong health system. And the other was when friends of ours lost their son from meningococcal disease when he was 18. A beautiful, healthy young man who unfortunately contracted meningococcus and became unwell with meningitis and died 24 hours later. And although I was working in the area of meningococcal vaccines, I really felt we'd let him down, that we should have these vaccines available sooner. So I've been a real advocate for having meningococcal vaccines available for young people.

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