Research nurses, officers and assistants

Alison Roberts

RN, Dip in Health Promotion

Julie Dart

RN

Julie Dart was trained at Princess Margaret Hospital as a registered nurse and paediatric nurse. After completing her training, she worked as a registered nurse at PMH before travelling overseas for several years to work in hospitals in London.

Julie then lived and worked a registered nurse in Port Hedland, Halls Creek and Carnarvon for eight years in the 1990s. When she moved back to Perth she worked as a sleep technologist in the Sleep Lab, Respiratory Department at PMH for 12 years.

Julie became involved in diabetes research in 2004, assisting on exercise studies. She joined the team as a clinical research nurse in 2006, and has been a key personnel in the HypoMon overnight clinical trials, co-ordinating the past two HypoMon clinical trials.

Currently, Julie is the Aussi AdDIT site study co-ordinator and the TrialNet Natural History site co-coordinator for the team. These studies aim to investigate the complications of diabetes and the aetiology of diabetes, respectively.

Julie is also the team's research nurse for the Closed Loop and Predictive Low Glucose Suspend studies which are part of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Consortium, in which the team is actively involved.

Publications:

Ly TT, Jones TW, Griffiths A, Dart J, Davis EA, Stick S, Wilson A. Hypoglycaemia does not change the threshold for arousal from sleep in adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics. 2012; 14(2):101-104

Alexandra Tully

Clinical research nurse

Alexandra joins the Diabetes and Obesity research team as a clinical research nurse after working in a variety of areas.

After completing a degree in nursing, she went to work as an emergency nurse before going on to do a postgraduate in midwifery. Most recently she has been working as a clinical facilitator.

Wayne Soon

BSc, BMedSci (Hons)

Research assistant

Areas of research expertise: Type 1 diabetes and exercise physiology

Wayne began working at The Kids Research Institute Australia in 2012 and is currently a research assistant for the Children’s Diabetes Centre.

Wayne’s PhD program involved investigating the blood glucose response to different types of exercise in order to determine the best ways to manage blood glucose levels during exercise for people living with Type 1 Diabetes. Wayne is also responsible for the exercise testing components of other research studies conducted within the Centre.

Visit here for Wayne's full bio.

Sabrina Binkowski

Master in Biotechnology, PhD in Microbiology

Research assistant

Sabrina joined the Children’s Diabetes Centre in 2018 Sabrina works across several studies including ENDIA and various Nutrition studies.

Currently, Sabrina is the site study coordinator for the coeliac study which is investigating the impact on a gluten-free diet on the blood glucose levels in children with T1D. She is also involved in qualitative research, focussing on identifying barriers to the management of T1D in families from a culturally and linguistically diverse background.

Prior to joining the centre, Sabrina worked in several research laboratories across Europe and has six years of research experience in investigating host pathogen interactions using multi omics approaches.

Jo O'Dea

BSc, Grad Cert

Research assistant

Jo joined the Children’s Diabetes Centre in 2016. In between graduating from university and starting with the group, Jo worked in a routine pathology laboratory for eight months as a laboratory assistant.

Jo works across a variety of the group’s projects in different theme areas, but predominantly within the exercise area. She is currently working on a project looking to develop educational resources for sports coaches of players with type 1 diabetes. She is also involved in a project looking to establish the prevalence of food insecurity among the Aboriginal patients who attend the Healthy Weight and type 2 diabetes services at Perth Children’s Hospital.

Jo also coordinates the TrialNet project, which seeks to screen relatives of people with type 1 diabetes for their risk of the condition.