Dr Rebecca Ormsby BSc (Hons)
PhD Coordinator, SA Neurological Tumour Bank
Coordinator, SA Brain Bank at the Centre for Neuroscience (Human Physiology)
Flinders University
Dr Ormsby currently manages the South Australian Neurological Tumour Bank located at Flinders University having established specimen and clinical data collection at the major hospitals in Adelaide. She has extensive experience organizing recruitment of participants, coordinating with neurosurgeons, clinicians and theatre staff to obtain and process surgically removed neurological tumour tissue, normal brain tissue and cerebral spinal fluid as well as sourcing and collating associated patient clinical data.
Dr Ormsby obtained her PhD in 2005 at Flinders University during which she spent time at the Hans Knoll Institute, Germany and the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her subsequent research identified the functional implications of a common genetic variant in the complement protein Factor H that increases the risks of age-related macular degeneration (Ormsby et al 2008).
Between 2007-2014 she worked as a Research Fellow in the Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer in the areas of cancer and radiation biology, studying the effects of ionizing radiation on DNA damage (Ormsby et al 2016), mutation, epigenetic changes (Newman et al 2014a; 2014b), as well as the effect of radioprotectors on modulating these responses (Ormsby et al 2014).
Research Expertise
Dr Ormsby currently manages the South Australian Neurological Tumour Bank located at Flinders University having established specimen and clinical data collection at the major hospitals in Adelaide. She has extensive experience organizing recruitment of participants, coordinating with neurosurgeons, clinicians and theatre staff to obtain and process surgically removed neurological tumour tissue, normal brain tissue and cerebral spinal fluid as well as sourcing and collating associated patient clinical data.
Research Interests
- Brain and spinal cord tissue processing and preservation
- Molecular biology
- Proteomics
Current NRF-funded projects include:
The establishment of a comprehensive database management system for the South Australian Neurological Tumour Bank
The SA Neurological Tumour Bank (SANTB) is a not-for-profit resource established to collect and bank blood and neurological tumour tissue from patients undergoing surgery to diagnose or remove their tumour. These specimens are available to researchers in SA and interstate to facilitate research projects into neurological cancer. NRF funds will help to establish and maintain a secure, customizable, web-based database management system to capture and link accurate, reliable and standardized patient clinical data (eg. pathology, treatment, survival) to each specimen. Obtaining comprehensive clinical data is extremely important to maximize the research value of each tumour collected in the drive to improve the outcome of patients with neurological cancer.
