Michèle’s top scientific mind

Michèle’s top scientific mind

An academic from the University of Waikato has been named one of the world’s most influential scientific minds.

Associate Professor Michèle Prinsep is a highly cited researcher in Pharmacology and Toxicology, and is one of nine New Zealand researchers - and 3126 worldwide - identified as being one of the “world’s most influential scientific minds of 2015” by Thomson Reuters.

“The work I do is quite interdisciplinary, sitting on the boundary between chemistry and biology, and it has broad applications,” says Dr Prinsep.

“For example I’m working with other scientists from the University of Waikato and from Plant & Food Research investigating whether anti-Psa chemicals can be found in marine organisms.”

Dr Prinsep received her BSc(Hons) and PhD degrees from the University of Canterbury, where she studied the isolation and structural elucidation of biologically active secondary metabolites from sponges and bryozoans.

She undertook postdoctoral research on cyanobacteria at the University of Hawaii before returning to New Zealand in 1991 to take up a lectureship at the University of Waikato where she is currently an Associate Professor. She won the Zonta award for Women in Science in 2000, is a fellow and past president of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, and a committee and foundation member of the Australia-New Zealand Marine Biotechnology Society Inc.

Dr Prinsep is on the editorial board of the journal Marine Drugs and is one of the New Zealand team that writes the highly cited annual reviews on marine natural products for the high impact journal Natural Product Reports published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. She writes the sections on microorganisms and bryozoans.

“There is a very strong trend in the field towards research on microorganisms, so my workload keeps increasing,” she says. “The Thomson Reuters recognition is very gratifying. It’s good to know that what you do has significant impact elsewhere, especially considering the time and effort you put into it.”

Dr Prinsep is involved in many international and national collaborative projects that are predominantly interdisciplinary in nature. Her current research interests include the isolation and structural elucidation of biologically active and/or novel metabolites from marine organisms, especially bryozoans and from marine and freshwater cyanobacteria and coastal fungi. Chemical ecology or looking at how organisms use the chemicals they produce in their interactions with other organisms is another strong interest.

It’s estimated there are about nine million researchers in the world who produce more than two million reports each year. Dr Prinsep’s work has been recognised as consistently wielding outsized influence in the form of citations from fellow scientists.

The more than 3000 highly cited researchers listed in the Thomson Reuters report were selected by analysing citation data over a recent 11-year period (2003-2013) and identifying those who published the greatest number of highly cited papers. Also identified were “hot researchers”, authors of papers published in a recent two-year period (2013-2014) that were cited immediately after publication at extraordinarily high levels. Highly cited papers rank in the top 1% and hot papers rank in the top .1% of the citation distributions of comparable papers, those matched for field and age.

ENDS

© Scoop Media