Prof. Michal Wallach

Professor Wallach was appointed (Sept. 2002) as the Inaugural Director of the Institute for the Biotechnology of Infectious Diseases (IBID) at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has spent periods of time working all over the world including in the USA at the Rockefeller University, New York, New York, in Israel at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem and in Europe at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Studies on malaria and Leishmania were ground breaking and led to publications in some very prestigious journals (Nature, PNAS).

Professor Wallach published over 60 papers in his field and has been invited to present his work at many international conferences all over the world. He has been awarded various prizes and grants including those from the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, the Roche Foundation, Basel, Switzerland and has received the Invited Lectureship Travel Grant, Australian Society for Parasitology in 1996.

In 2008, Professor Wallach establish a new course in Bio-Innovation where Masters and PhD students work in small teams to come up with creative and innovate ideas for medical health products. This course has been successfully run over the past 6 years at UTS as well as the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology where Prof. Wallach is a Visiting Professor. More recently, Prof. Wallach has initiated an international course in Bio-Innovation in which PhD students from UTS, Kolling Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, The Technion and National Taiwan University/Academia Sinica work together in mixed teams to develop innovative ideas for medical health products. Each year the course is run in a different host country.

In 2013, Prof. Wallach was appointed as the inaugural director of the SPARK Sydney program, which was established to emulate the SPARK program developed at the Stanford University School of Medicine, USA. The program is currently being established by UTS and Kolling Institute, with the launch on November 19, 2014 at the NSW State Government Investment and Trade. The first round of projects have been selected and this program will enable researchers to both receive seed funding and professional mentoring. The goal is to translate research carried out at the two participating institutions for the benefit of human health, to engage with the Sydney based industry and professional community and also to improve our research capability and innovative culture.