Dr Narin Osman, Senior Research Fellow

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Narin Osman:

My name is Narin Osman and I research vascular diseases. A simple way to understand my research is to think of your arteries as the pipes that distribute the blood around your body and as the blood moves around your body you need to take in the proteins and nutrients and chemicals like hormones through the vessel wall to nourish the organs surrounding your vessels. So that could be your kidney, brain, heart – all of your organs of course.

So as the nutrients and chemical factors move through the vessel wall when we're healthy the vascular wall reacts normally and uses these triggers to respond in a healthy way. But as we age and for reasons that aren't quite clear the vessel wall can start to react in unusual and unhealthy ways as we age and the triggers that are activated as elements move through the vessel wall can trigger abnormal responses and initiate diseases like atherosclerosis and macular degeneration.

I've found it quite an exciting transition really because RMIT is a place where there's a growing dynamic research environment and it has many resources available to me to take my research to new levels where I can increase the impact, make connections to both local scientists, researchers, clinicians around Melbourne, Australia and also on a global footprint. And really that's the way we need to do it to make impacts with health solutions in today's world.

Most of the impacts from my research are really peer reviewed scientific publications, conference presentations and the impact they have is to inform other researchers and clinicians interested in my broader research area of the developments I've been able to find in my research and to see how they can – those results can interact with what they know.

RMIT offers some fantastic opportunities both in the support it gives me to continue my research in terms of resources and a growing dynamic research environment through the university and through its connections in the centre of excellence that Melbourne is in terms of medical research. It also provides me a fantastic opportunity to teach and lead the upcoming generation of scientists. I can do this through medical sciences by my undergraduate teaching, by coordinating the honours research year and also by teaching and supervising masters and PhD students. So it offers me the best of both worlds both in teaching and research.

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