Rate My Professor Chantal Donovan

Dr Chantal Donovan serves as an Honorary Lecturer in the School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy within the College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing at the University of Newcastle. She completed her Bachelor of Science with first-class Honours and her Doctor of Philosophy in Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Melbourne from January 2012 to April 2015. Following her PhD, she conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Pharmacology at Monash University from April 2015 to December 2016, including specialized training under Professor Michael Sanderson at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the USA. In 2016, Dr Donovan joined the University of Newcastle as an NHMRC Peter Doherty Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow (NHMRC Early Career Fellowship GNT G1600099) with Professor Phil Hansbro's team at the Hunter Medical Research Institute, where she investigated lung diseases until 2020. She maintains an honorary lecturer appointment at the University of Newcastle and has supervised eight PhD completions as co-supervisor.

Dr Donovan's research centers on the pathogenesis of chronic respiratory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, asthma-COPD overlap, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), utilizing precision-cut lung slices to study airway remodelling, inflammation, and novel therapeutics such as IL-33 inhibitors. She has obtained over $650,000 in competitive funding, including NHMRC Project Grant GNT G1700056 for targeting remodelling in COPD, asthma, and IPF ($396,411, 2018–2020) and NHMRC Early Career Fellowship ($213,007, 2017–2020). Her awards include the British Pharmacological Society/ASCEPT Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2016), Finalist in the TSANZ Young Investigator Award (2014), Garth McQueen oral presentation prize (ASCEPT, 2012), and numerous oral and poster prizes at national meetings. Key publications comprise 'Particulate matter air pollution as a cause of lung cancer: epidemiological and experimental evidence' (British Journal of Cancer, 2025, with M. Wang et al.), 'IL-33 in Chronic Respiratory Disease: From Preclinical to Clinical Studies' (ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 2020), 'Animal models of COPD: What do they tell us?' (Respirology, 2017, with B. Jones et al.), 'Targeting the IL-33/IL-13 Axis for Respiratory Viral Infections' (Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, 2016), and 'Rosiglitazone elicits in vitro relaxation in airways and precision cut lung slices from a mouse model of chronic allergic airways disease' (American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, 2015). She has produced over 75 journal articles and served as a reviewer for various journals and chaired sessions at the European Respiratory Society Annual Scientific Meeting (2016).