Lorna Milgate Scholarship Fund

A scholar’s reflections

A Lorna Milgate scholar 25 years on reflects on a challenging year.

When I was a medical student in the 1990s I had very little money and often found myself bewildered as I watched my student friends buy coffees every day (‘where did those untold riches come from?’) I was really cash strapped and watched every cent, at one point with about $60 a week for all my expenses after I paid rent. At that time I was offered a small stipend from the Lorna Milgate Scholarship Fund which, with family help and some parttime work, allowed me to focus on my studies and graduate with a medical degree in 2000. The scholarship made a huge difference in getting me to the starting line of a career in medicine and I was, and am, very grateful. Twenty years have passed and I am now well settled in my speciality, working hard as a bone marrow transplant doctor at Westmead Hospital and as a researcher at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, and supervise a team of scientists, health carers and doctoral students with a goal to make bone marrow transplant a safer and more effective therapy. We use state of the art cell therapy techniques such as gene modification and single cell selection to mitigate the many risks such as infection or relapse of the cancer for which patients are having treatment. We have established a manufacturing facility at Westmead that can produce individually designed cell therapies for patients depending on their specific cancer’s characteristics and so far, we’ve seen very encouraging results in clinical trials. In some cases, patients with no more treatment options for their lymphoma or leukaemia have experienced complete remissions. There is still much to do, and these incredible responses are not yet frequent enough.

Associate Professor Dr Emily Blyth

The twenty-year anniversary of my graduation came last year and I completely missed it. Instead, I was focused on getting my patients safely through their transplants when our usual way of doing things had turned completely upside down. One of the unexpected effects of the pandemic has been the interruption in international