It’s official. Students from Aix Marseille Université, Polytech Marseille, have been travelling to Brisbane to study at the Queensland Eye Institute for more than ten years. A new memorandum of understanding, executed in June in Marseille by Professor Mark Radford on behalf of QEI, provides certainty for the internship program for another five years.
The agreement commits Aix Marseille Université and the Queensland Eye Institute to collaborate across the materials and biomedical engineering programs common to both.
In particular, the agreement supports a continuing exchange of students, academic, research and administrative staff, conducting collaborative research and education projects, and exchanging research and materials.
For many of the young students who come to QEI, the internship is their first taste of formal laboratory work. Over the course of their placement, the students learn valuable skills and gain real-life experience in a working lab. For QEI, the experiments run by the students represent valuable progress towards its research goals.
Coincidentally, the Memorandum of Understanding was signed in Marseilles just as the latest group of visiting students, pictured above, prepared to return home to France. The students worked in the QEI laboratory from March to July 2025 and contributed to the following QEI research projects:
- accelerated gelation of silk sericin isolated from the cocoons produced by a mutant silkworm
- crosslinking hyaluronic acid with gold nanoparticles
- investigating safe and effective cryoprotective agents for preserving human adipose-derived stem cells
- photo crosslinking collagen in sheep eyelid using irradiation with blue light