Posted 8 October 2024
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Professor Helen Thomas, an outstanding medical researcher whose work in type 1 diabetes made a significant impact.
Helen was born in Darwin and grew up in Perth. She first started working together with Tom Kay more than 30 years ago, when she was 25, joining his lab at WEHI as its first employee. She had moved to Melbourne to live with her sister Anna, then a designer at Country Road.
Helen quickly showed that she, like Anna, had remarkable technical skills, and decided to enrol in a PhD. She was a highly qualified PhD student, with a first author Nature paper already in her pocket from her time working at EMBL in Heidelberg.
In her PhD, Helen showed that interferon gamma was the main stimulus for the expression of MHC class I molecules on beta cells. She developed highly refined methods for making transgenic mice, and isolating and dispersing mouse islets for flow cytometry and apoptosis assays.
Helen has had a profound impact at SVI, since her arrival in 2002. She was an exemplary research leader, providing empathetic support and supervision to many and building a high functioning research group and a network of friends and collaborators at SVI, throughout Australia and all around the world. Helen was loved, respected, trusted and admired by her many collaborators and colleagues for whom nothing was too much trouble in providing reagents, mouse strains and advice.
Helen was made Associate Director of SVI in 2016. In 2019 she was appointed honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne. She was instrumental in many of the Institute’s key type 1 diabetes discoveries, including the recent successful BANDIT clinical trial and the JDRF-funded Australasian Type 1 Diabetes Immunotherapy Collaborative (ATIC). She was also founder of Effica biolabs, SVI’s platform offering bespoke pre-clinical testing of new type 1 diabetes therapies.
Helen’s laser-like focus on getting things done was the cornerstone of the diabetes group’s successful work over two decades at SVI. She focused on nurturing those around her, thinking always of others first and then stepping back and joyfully celebrating their achievements. She was humble and self-effacing to a fault. Countless collaborators have been in touch with variations of descriptions of Helen as “a great scientist and a wonderful person”.
In addition to all of this, Helen nurtured her close-knit family, was a beach lover, a creative spirit – a potter and a knitter – an Ottolenghi enthusiast, a sourdough devotee and a woman of eclectic and exemplary music tastes.
All of our love and support goes out to Helen’s husband, Vince, her beloved children Jack and Gaby, her parents Rosemary and Thomas, sisters Ranjeny and Cathy and to her extended family and friends.