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Two agricultural science PhD students from The University of Western Australia were awarded the Mike Carroll Travelling Fellowship at a ceremony on Thursday, 25 February.

The Mike Carroll Travelling Fellowship is a memorial to the late Dr Mike Carroll, who was associated with the WA Department of Agriculture for over 20 years, serving as Director-General from 1990 to 1994.

Mr Joseph Steer and Ms Anna Aryani Amir, both from UWA’s School of Animal Biology and Institute of Agriculture received the 2014 and 2015 fellowship respectively, to visit and learn new techniques from national and international research centres to advance their studies.

Joseph Steer, whose research is funded by the Australian Wool Innovation and Department of Agriculture and Food WA, spent five weeks at Rothamsted Research in England studying methods to identify which odours attract blowflies to sheep.

“Understanding how these odours influence blowflies provides sheep breeders with an opportunity to selectively breed sheep for resistance to flystrike, a disease that costs the industry around $280 million dollars a year,” Joseph said.

“Such a breeding objective would reduce the need for sheep to be muelsed.”

The 2015 fellowship recipient, Anna Aryani Amir used the Mike Carroll Travelling Fellowship to collaborate with the Turretfield Research Centre in South Australia, a world leader in in vitro fertilisation studies in sheep. Anna is researching the effect of plant extracts and plant secondary compounds from grazing new legume pastures on reproduction of sheep.

“We learnt from clover disease outbreak in the 1950s that plant secondary compounds from pastures sheep graze on can affect fertility in sheep,” Anna said.

“At the Turretfield Research Centre, I learned how to manage and process eggs sourced from ovaries at random stages in the reproductive cycle to analyse the effect plant extracts have on sheep fertility.”

Mrs Helen Carroll, who presented the awards with her son, Mr Andrew Carroll, at a ceremony at UWA’s Faculty of Science said the Fellowship honours her deceased husband’s devotion to agriculture, and his tireless efforts to give back to the agricultural community.

“Recipients of the fellowship are chosen not just on academic ability, but their potential to benefit from the experience, and their enthusiasm to impart the findings of their travels to the scientific, farming and wider community on their return to WA,” Mrs Carroll said.

Applications for the 2016 Mike Carroll Travelling Fellowship are open to postgraduate students enrolled in agricultural science at UWA. For more information or to apply, students can contact [email protected]

Media references

Hackett Professor Kadambot Siddique (+61 8) 6488 7012

Diana Boykett (Communications Officer, The UWA Institute of Agriculture)                                  (+61 8) 6488 3756 / (+61 4) 04 152 262