Image: Thalia Babbage
We welcome new PhD students Thalia Babbage and Risa Takahashi.
Thalia thesis entitled, ‘Exercise Training and the Peripheral Chemoreflex in Health and Disease’. She is supervised by Associate Professor James Fisher and co-supervised by Professor Julian Paton.
Thalia has recently embarked on her doctoral studies in the Department of Physiology at the beginning of May 2020 having completed an 18-month period of employment with Sport Auckland as a member of the Health & Wellness team. Thalia is a University of Auckland alumna and completed an Honours degree in Exercise Science in 2018, where her dissertation project examined the influence of tissue oxygen availability on microvascular regulation in humans. As might be expected from this background, Thalia has a strong interest in the integral role that exercise plays in physical and mental well-being, and specifically in understanding how exercise can be used as an adjunct therapy to treat chronic disease. Her doctoral studies seek to better understand the physiological mechanisms underpinning the cardiovascular benefits of exercise training, with a focus on the peripheral chemoreflex. It is hoped that this work can help inform the future development and optimisation of the therapeutic use of exercise training in individuals living with chronic diseases. The plan is to begin by conducting investigations of healthy exercise-trained individuals, before developing this line of investigation in people with chronic conditions, such as metabolic syndrome and hypertension.
Risa Takahashi, PhD student starting 1 July 2020, department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology. Her thesis entitled, ‘Understanding the Innate Immune Response to Group A Streptococcus Pili’. She is supervised by Professor Thomas Proft and co-supervised by Dr Catherine Tsai.