Centre of Immunology and Breastfeeding

Our vision, mission and values

Vision

Making human milk the gold standard for children's immune health.

By this, we mean ensuring that:

1. Human milk supports child health on a global scale.
2. When suitable, preventive and treatment strategies for children are modeled after human milk.

Mission

Our goal is to build a holistic understanding of how breastfeeding practices and human milk composition influence healthy immune development. This knowledge will enable healthcare providers to make recommendations to parents to improve child health worldwide.

We have three strategic pillars that underpin our mission:

Innovation: We challenge existing dogma to provide newborns with personalised strategies tailored to their developmental age.

Collaboration: We foster collaborative international, multidisciplinary, and translational research to make high-impact discoveries.

Communication: Through a combination of publication in prestigious journals, presentation to a wide audience, and strong consumer involvement, we ensure that our findings reach those who can implement them and benefit communities worldwide.

Our priorities for the next five years...

1. Target vulnerable populations
2. Bring knowledge on the importance of breastfeeding in healthy skin development
3. Promote allergy prevention through Breastfeeding
4. Prioritise our partnerships with Asia

Our team values 

Through our values of respect, empathy, transparency, and generosity, we are fostering a team culture that celebrates humanity.

We are committed to excellence, learning from the experiences of others, from our mistakes, and always striving to do better. 

We prioritise teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration, ensuring that the serendipitous nature of discovery research translates into impactful, effective solutions for all.

Supporters

The Centre for Immunology and Breastfeeding is one of the five chairs endowed by the generous support from the Family Larsson Rosenquist Foundation. This donation provides financial independence in perpetuity, and enables us to pursue panoramic research with long horizons, in complete independence and freedom of research and teaching. 

We are also grateful to receive grant support from: 

• Western Australia Child Research Foundation 
• Future Health Research and Innovation Focus Grant
• Channel 7 Telethon Trust 
• Telethon Kids Institute collaborative award 
• Westfarmer Centre of vaccines and Infectious Disease  (WCID) seed and partnership grant