Samantha Nixon
University of Queensland
Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship, an ADC Forum Australian Young Leader Award, a 2019 National Geographic Women of Impact Ambassador, UQ Global Change Scholars Award, the Women in Technology Young Science Achiever Award and was the 2020 winner of the Queensland Women in STEM Prize.
Samantha is a former arachnophobe, turned venoms scientist and spider advocate. She is a final year PhD student at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland and CSIRO studying spider venoms as a potential source of antiparasitic drugs.
She worked with both academia and industry to lead the first large-scale screen of venoms against parasites, which lead to the identification of several novel antiparasitic compounds.
Samantha has worked around the world, from the Amazon to Antarctica, the latter resulting from her selection as the youngest participant ever for the all-women in STEM Antarctic expedition with the Homeward Bound Leadership program.
Samantha is a keen advocate for science, having spoken to over 1500 Queensland school children about her research, and she is a passionate communicator across TV, radio, digital and print media.
Her goal is to help people overcome their fear of spiders and to inspire the next generation of Australian scientists.
Samantha has been recognised for her leadership and contributions to Australian science with a Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship, an ADC Forum Australian Young Leader Award, a 2019 National Geographic Women of Impact Ambassador, UQ Global Change Scholars Award, the Women in Technology Young Science Achiever Award and was the 2020 winner of the Queensland Women in STEM Prize.
She has won competitive grants from the Burroughs-Wellcome Trust, UQ and CSIRO, and awards from the International Society on Toxinology, the World Association for Veterinary Parasitology and the Australian Society for Parasitology.
Samantha was a 2019 National Geographic Women of Impact Ambassador, and the 2020 recipient of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Green Talent Fellowship for work on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.