Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health SciencesResearch Domains

"Nothing is worse than working in isolation. It's important to have people to talk to and to know the people to talk to," says Kate Drummond, coordinator for the Cancer research domain.

With a background in clinical cancer management, cancer administration and research experience, as well as being a full-time cancer neurosurgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Kate Drummond is aware of the large task at hand. "Here in Melbourne we have all the resources to do world class research and to make a real difference to cancer patients. But we haven't been good at coordinating all these resources for the best outcome. We have world class researchers and clinicians and large hospitals with huge numbers of patients. We should be making a difference on the world stage."

Kate now heads the central nervous system tumour stream at the Department of Neurosurgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, having been encouraged by a high school teacher to study medicine. "She said to me: "You can do it" and "so I did!" Kate began her studies at Sydney University, where she discovered her love of neurosurgery, an area in which she can make a big difference to patients' lives: "They are such sick patients; the sickest of the sick with the grimmest outlook. You really want to do all you can for them."

Kate came to the RMH in 1997 and was only the fourth woman in Australia to complete her neurosurgical training. A clinical research fellowship allowed Kate to work at the Brigham Women's Hospital at Harvard for six months in the year 2000 to learn intraoperative MRI, developed at Harvard. She later returned and spent three years between 2001 and 2004 researching the invasion of astrocytomas for her MD.

Kate believes that success in cancer research lies in "creating networks, more promotion of the work being done around us, more collaboration, more translational research."