Bob Kao and Kieran Short

Kieran Short is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He studied for his PhD at the University of Adelaide, and is now undertaking postdoctoral studies in Ian Smyth's laboratory. Bob Kao is a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow in the Molecules, Cells and Organisms programme at Harvard University, in Andy McMahon's laboratory. Kieran and Bob both study genes that control how different cells and tissues form in the embryonic kidney, a process that ultimately endows the organ with the ability to filter the body's blood.

Bob is interested in understanding how the filtering units of the kidney are formed from progenitor cells in the early embryo, and particularly in how the complex tubes that make up the adult kidney develop in the right place, at the right time. Kieran is working to understand inherited kidney disease and has been developing imaging and analytical tools to study kidney development using an approach known as optical projection tomography.

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