Events

TEDxQUT aims to inspire and engage the community around ideas to change the world.

QUT Science and Engineering Faculty will be hosting it's first TEDx event this August.

Themed 'ideas to change the world', speakers will be invited to present their ideas and innovations at TEDxQUT to an audience of university students, high school students and university academics.

From April 2nd Science and Engineering students can apply to attend TEDxQUT through submitting a 60 second video on their "Idea to Change the world".

You can stay up-to-date on details through the TEDxQUT facebook page
or visit the event page at TED.com

Confirmed guest speaker

Jack Andraka
Read about Jack's TED2013 talk
Watch video about Jack Andraka

Jack has given a number of accounts of what inspired him to work on pancreatic cancer, including the death of his uncle and an acquaintance. In looking for answers, he found that one reason for the poor survival rate from pancreatic cancer was the lack of early detection and a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive screening method.

He began to think of various ways of detecting and preventing cancer growth and terminating the growth before the cancer cells become pervasive. Jack said the idea for his pancreatic cancer test came to him while he was in biology class at North County High School, drawing on the class lesson about antibodies and the article on analytical methods using carbon nanotubes he was surreptitiously reading at the time.

He then contacted 200 professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health in order to receive laboratory help. He had received nearly 200 rejection emails before he got a positive reply from Dr. Anirban Maitra, Professor of Pathology, Oncology and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The result of his project was a new dipstick type diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer using a novel paper sensor, similar to that of the diabetic test strip.

This strip tests for the level of mesothelin, a pancreatic cancer biomarker, in blood or urine, to determine whether or not a patient has early-stage Prof. Maitra is very enthusiastic about Andraka's future. He told the Baltimore Sun "You're going to read about him a lot in the years to come... What I tell my lab is, 'Think of Thomas Edison and the light bulb.' This kid is the Edison of our times. There are going to be a lot of light bulbs coming from him."

Date

10 August 2013

Location

Science and Engineering Centre

Email

sef.externalrelations@qut.edu.au