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Professor Keryn Williams has been made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest award that the Queen can make in Australia.

Professor Williams joined the Nuffield Department of Surgery, as it was formerly known, from Melbourne as a postdoc in 1975 to work with Professor Sir Peter Morris as a non-medical lecturer in immunology and then switched to being a scientific research officer on Professor Morris’s programme grant in transplantation immunology. 

She worked in the NDS for six years until returning to Adelaide in Australia as a Senior Research Scientist in a new Department of Ophthalmology headed by Professor Doug Coster at Flinders University in Adelaide. She concentrated on the immunology of corneal graft rejection and became a world authority in this field.

She also was the Founder and Scientific Director of the Australian Corneal Graft Registry from 1985 and this has made major contributions in the field of corneal transplantation nationally and internationally, and she co-founded the Eye Bank of South Australia. She was made a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow and was appointed as a full professor in 2011. She also served for five years as an Associate Dean of Research and Chair of the Research Committee in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Flinders University.

Professor Williams has had an outstanding career in the field and the NDS can claim considerable kudos from her career both during and after her time in the department and finally in this highly prestigious award of an AC.

Read more on this story in the Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser.