Profile: Associate Professor Genevieve Steiner-Lim

Profile

Associate Professor Genevieve Steiner-Lim

Associate Professor Genevieve Steiner-Lim, Co-lead of SPHERE’s Age and Ageing Clinical Academic Group, dreams of memory clinics where the latest research forms the basis of treatment and interventions.

In Associate Professor Genevieve Steiner-Lim’s ideal world, patients coming into memory clinics would get access to treatment and interventions based on the latest evidence-based research. In these clinics, clinicians and researchers would work together offering each patient personalised treatment and coordinated care which would directly improve their health outcomes.

While much progress has already been made in this area, such as the creation of a gold-standard memory clinic “one-stop-shop” model of care, A/Prof Steiner-Lim who coleads SPHERE’S Age and Ageing Clinical Academic Group (AAA CAG) together with Prof Friedbert Kohler (Clinical Director, Aged Care and Rehabilitation, South West Sydney Local Health District), sees the potential for even greater improvements addressing unmet needs in this field.

“So many discoveries and innovations in research sit on the shelf gathering dust, never seeing a patient in the real world. A very small amount of actual research gets translated and I’m passionate about seeing this change. The only way this can happen is if multidisciplinary teams of researchers and clinicians work closely together on discovery science and clinical trials to make sure that the research questions being answered are practical, holistic and, ultimately, can move seamlessly between the benchtop and the bedside, and vice versa,” she explains.

As the Clinical Research Lead at Western Sydney University’s NICM Health Research Institute and an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, A/Prof Steiner-Lim’s research spans early detection, prevention, and treatment of memory issues in older people with the aim of reducing dementia risk and improving quality of life.

Her research program builds on a strong foundation of fundamental human cognitive neuroscience. In earlier work, she discovered that the human pupil dilates to new information regardless of whether it is relevant or not – a finding that challenged the long-held belief that the pupil dilation response is a measure of the ‘what is that?’ reflex. Her discovery was adopted by NASA to inform methods for capturing sensory information from astronauts experiencing reduced stimulation during long duration spaceflight.

A/Prof Steiner-Lim established

her research group in 2016, ‘the HEADBOX Lab,’ which aims to understand the biological bases of human behaviour and cognition. Her team uses psychophysiology and psychopharmacology to generate new knowledge on brain function and assess how new and emerging therapies affect neurocognition. This adds a depth of understanding to clinical trial outcomes in dementia and mild cognitive impairment, going beyond whether interventions improve cognition or delay deterioration, by showing how interventions work (or don’t work) to help us better understand personalised treatment.

A/Prof Steiner-Lim works closely alongside her husband, Dr Edwin Lim, a neuroscientist and biostatistician with expertise in cell culture, animal models, biochemistry, and machine learning. Together, they are a powerhouse of ideas and innovation, delivering integrated and transdisciplinary neuroscience research that can directly benefit patients.

Her latest five-year research program, “Teaching an old brain new tricks: optimising cognitive training through neuroplasticity,” which received a $1.5 million NHMRC Investigator Grant (APP1195709) in 2020, aims to promote independence, functioning, and diminish disability and deterioration from dementia. To do this, she is stimulating neuroplasticity – the brain’s in-built ability to adapt and rewire itself – and harnessing its power to optimise interventions for older people who have a high risk of dementia.

Receiving the NHMRC Investigator Grant at Emerging Leadership 2 is no small feat (only 8.4% of female applicants at her level were successful). But for those who have worked with A/Prof Steiner-Lim, it comes as no surprise.

Since graduating with a PhD in Psychophysiology with Examiners’ Commendation for Outstanding Thesis from the University of Wollongong in 2015, some of her awards and achievements include two consecutive NHMRC Fellowships (NHMRC Investigator Grant, 2021-2026 and an NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowship, 2016–2020), 22 awards and prizes including a NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2018) and an Australia-China Young Scientists Exchange Program Award (2016), attracting >$15.6 million AUD in grant funding ($6.2 million as CI), and publishing >70 peer reviewed publications in high ranking journals in her field (e.g., World Psychiatry; #1/157 ranking journal in Psychiatry). She currently leads a team of 13 (three postdoctoral fellows and 10 higher degree research students) and, prior to her current role, was Director of Research at the NICM Health Research Institute (2019–2020) and President of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology (2017–2019).

With A/Prof Steiner-Lim at the helm of AAA CAG, SPHERE is excited about the power of research to help improve patient outcomes for Australia’s ageing population.