In The Community

Supporting our community is incredibly important to us.

Through our local partnership with the Raine Medical Research Foundation we are fortunate enough to support a range of initiatives that make a difference to the community. Some of these include:

The Charter Hall Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar Award program that facilitates the visit of high-achieving international postdoctoral research scientists who are in the early stages of their career. Visiting scientists bring many benefits to the WA scientific community including advances in health and medicine, cross-fertilisation of skills and ideas, networking and collaboration, as well as important reciprocal exchange programs. Visiting scientists also make a significant contribution to the teaching and research programs in their specialist field of medical research. Dr Emanuela Zannin from Politecnico di Milano, Italy was awarded the first Charter Hall Postdoctoral Scholar Award and visited Perth in October 2018. Dr Zannin is a biomedical engineer who looks at ways of improving biomedical technologies to help pre-term babies that are often born with respiratory problems.

Charter Hall’s fundraising project during the Raine Square development in 2018 supported medical research to treat children with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD, learning difficulties, autism and range of communication and motor disorders. The study was led by Professor Stephen Houghton, Director of the Centre for Child and Adolescent related disorders, with his team at the University of Western Australia. The research concentrated on identifying different scenarios and groups of kids with neurological disorders that deal with loneliness throughout metro and rural Western Australia. The research resulted in the development of an app that helps improve the lives of children living neurodevelopment disorders via a 3-D animated interactive self-paced programme.

In 2019, the Charter Hall Research Collaboration Award programme was established, which aims to facilitate national and international research collaboration opportunities, skill and knowledge transfer, and conference attendance for early-career child health researchers. Dr Gizachew Tessema from Curtin University was supported in 2020 to develop a collaboration with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health to investigate whether the time between two successive births impacts on the frequency of adverse birth outcomes, while eliminating biases that were introduced in other studies due to not including pregnancy loss. This research aims to improve clinical recommendations to minimise adverse birth outcomes.

In 2021, this award was granted to Dr Cele Richardson from the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia. This research is investigating whether inclusion of bright light therapy improves sleep and mental health outcomes for young people with depression. 

Further details can be found on the Raine Foundation website.

To make a donation or learn more about this valuable research go to https://charterhall.benojo.com/area-of-interest/children-young-people/campaigns