Reducing harm and better living through chemistry

Professor Penny Brothers is a New Zealander educated at the University of Auckland and Stanford University. She joined the Research School of Chemistry at ANU in early 2019. Prior to ANU, Professor Brothers was in the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Auckland. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of California (both at Davis and Berkeley), the Universities of Heidelberg, Münster, and Burgundy, Peking University, the Arctic University of Norway, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (as a Fulbright Senior Scholar). She has served as President of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, Principal Investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Nanomaterials, Associate Editor of Chemical Communications, and is on the Marsden Fund Council. She is currently investigating the chemistry of boron coordinated to porphyrin and corrole ligands, BODIPY fluorophores for sugar recognition and surface patterning using molecular pentagons.

Professor Mal McLeod is a Chemist from the Research School of Chemistry at ANU, with research interests that include the development of new chemical and analytical technologies to study drugs and drug metabolism. He led the chemistry teams at the ACT Government sanctioned pill testing trials, held at Groovin' the Moo music festival in 2018 and 2019, and at the CanTEST Health and Drug Checking Service pilot that opened in July 2022. He also serves as Scientific Advisor to Pill Testing Australia and Directions Health Services on the use of analytical technologies for drug checking. As a 2020 Churchill Fellow he visited leading international drug checking services to rapidly improve analytical chemistry capabilities in Australia.