Meet our inspiring alumni
Meet Alvin
After graduating with a Bachelor of Biomedicine Alvin later landed a role as Clinical Marketing Specialist at Sysmex Corporation, a medical devices company based in Kobe, Japan. For Alvin, the Biomedicine degree prepared him with fundamental biomedical knowledge and critical thinking skills that he was able to apply and bring impact to this role.
“I contributed to the planning and launch of new immunoassays on Sysmex’s automated immunoassay systems - and their value to clinicians for diagnosing,” explains Alvin.
Immunoassays are tests using the binding of antibodies to antigens to identify and measure certain substances for example therapeutic drugs, hormones, enzymes - and may be used to diagnose and monitor disease. At Sysmex Alvin worked on immunoassays across various diseases, including COVID-19, Hepatitis B and C Virus (HBV / HCV) and sexually transmitted infections.
Learning about the mechanisms of disease and issues in public health during my undergraduate studies was extremely enjoyable and stood me in good stead for my position at Sysmex.
As part of his Biomedicine degree Alvin completed a research program at the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research (UMCCR) at the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre. He went on to work there after graduating and published his research.
“It was a highlight - I had a particular interest in cancer and had excellent supervisors who guided and mentored me…working in such an immersive and state of the art facility was inspiring,” he says.
Alvin also studied breadth subjects in Chinese and Finance during his undergraduate degree.
“Breadth subjects enabled me to meet people outside Biomedicine and I have used knowledge from those subjects since graduating university.”
More recently, Alvin has been looking for career growth and the opportunity to work within the biotech industry and across innovations here in Australia and has taken a role as Senior Marketing Assistant at SpeeDx in Sydney, a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing company that specialises in molecular diagnostic solutions to offer comprehensive information for improved patient management.
His role at SpeeDx is focused on marketing and development of DNA-based testing, analysis of health care trends, understanding what clinicians needs are to improve patient management, to plan where products go, as well as supporting marketing communications.
“I really want to relate my work to healthcare and to help people - this is my way of doing that.”