Let’s discuss working together as a supervisor- student of your HDR research?

Congratulations on planning to undertake higher degree research. Students often benefit from different perspectives in their supervisory panel.  Students need supervisors for support, guidance, mentoring and help to start the work, support the work, and help to progress the work when it gets stuck.  Therefore, students and supervisors should be thinking about the best ways to work together. 

Why am I offering research supervision support?

All senior academics have benefited from mentoring and supervision support in our own careers. A core part of the university sector, is that senior academics be available to support high degrees students to enter the academic community, develop research skills, and have developed capability as future independent researchers.  I hope to support others to develop excellence in research, so that research community continues to benefit from working with health researchers. 

About Me:

I’m planning my student supervision activities for 2022-2023.  I like to meet potential students, so we can learn about each other and start thinking about the ways to support good student experiences and student productivity. 

I am a Torres Strait Islander woman, a mother, and I work as a clinician (nephrology), and in academia.  I am based on Larrakia Country (Darwin), in Wellbeing and Preventable Chronic Diseases Division at Menzies School of Health Research, at John Matthews Building in Tiwi.  My email address is Jaqui.hughes@menzies.edu.au.

My Research:

I lead kidney health collaborative research in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. I also supervise clinicians to develop skills to audit, report on and publish their clinical practice; I also lead or am actively contributing to large scale research where different methods are used – quantitative, survey, focus group and in-depth interviews.  My research program means I collaborate with other research leaders in the Northern Territory and nationally.  More information about my work is found here: Jaqui Hughes - Menzies.

How has my research practices supported benefits in the community?

As a PhD student, I developed new research knowledge on body build and body composition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples. This knowledge was used to investigate if the way kidney function was reported by pathology companies needed body composition information to improve the accuracy of the blood test.  Recently, I’ve been using my knowledge as both a clinician and a researcher to investigate questions about the best treatment for a skin infection that causes a lot of itch, but also could prevent people accessing kidney transplant, and I work in the policy and advocacy areas to support research findings to have a long lasting benefits.