Margaret Sheil

Margaret Sheil is an Australian academic, Provost, standing deputy to the Vice-Chancellor and the Chief Academic Officer for the University of Melbourne.^[1]

Early years

Margaret Sheil was born in Sydney in August 1961. As a teenager, she regularly visited the Department or Chemistry at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) where her mother, a nurse, was seconded to work on a scientific study to monitor lead levels in the blood of children exposed to petroleum. Obtaining a Bachelor of Science and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from UNSW, Sheil accepted her first post-doctoral position at the University of Utah, followed by another at the Australian National University.

University

Returning to Australia in 1990, Sheil accepted a lectureship in chemistry at the University of Wollongong, was promoted to Professor of Chemistry in 2000 before becoming Dean of Science in 2001. The University of Wollongong Council appointed her to the role of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) in 2002, and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor ( DVC Research) in 2005. Under the leadership of the DVC Research, the University of Wollongong underwent a major change in the strategic direction to boost research outcomes and develop a high performance research culture. As a part of this change, research activities were restructured with the previous 35 research centres/institutes reduced to 12 and research resources redirected to these areas of research strength.

Sheil's career has followed the path of a researcher in the field of chemistry, in university leadership roles and as the Chief Executive Officer^[2] of the Australian Research Council (2007-2012). In that role she led the development of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) evaluation of Australian University Research. She is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI), the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), and was made an inaugural Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Mass Spectrometry (ANZSMS) in February 2014. Professor Sheil is a member of the Advisory Council of the CSIRO Science Industry Endowment Fund (SIEF), a member of the Clunies Ross Awards Committee of ATSE and the Australia Indonesia Centre. In 2016 Professor Sheil joined the Board on the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and the ATSE Board. She has previously been a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC), a member of the University Advisory Board for Coursera, the National Research Infrastructure Council, the Cooperative Research Centre Programme and served as an Education Specialist on the Board of the Australian National Selection Commission for UNESCO. Throughout her career, Sheil has sought to find ways to progress the participation, success and recognition of girls and women in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Most recently, Professor Sheil gave the 2014 Diana Temple Memorial Lecture^[3] at the University of Sydney charting her own experiences and life history against the backdrop of the changing constraints and opportunities that applied to women during those decades.

Selected publications

1. S.J. Watt, M.M. Sheil. J.L. Beck, P. Prosserlkov, G. Otting and N.E. Dixon “Effect of protein stabilisation on charge state distribution in positive- and negative-ion electrospray ionisation mass spectra.” Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (2007) 18, 1605-1611
2. O.K. Bernhard, J. Lai, J. Wilkinson, M.M. Sheil, A.L. Cunningham* “Proteomic analysis of DC-SIGN on dendritic cells detects tetramers required for ligand binding but no association with CD4.” Journal of Biological Chemistry (2004), 279, 51828-51835
3. R. Gupta, S. Hamdan, N.E. Dixon, M.M. Sheil, J.L. Beck* “Application of electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry to study the hydrophobic interactions between the ε and θ subunits of DNA polymerase III.” Protein Science (2004) 13, 2878-2887
4. O.K. Bernhard, A.L. Cunningham, M.M. Sheil* “Analysis of proteins copurifying with the CD4/lck complex using one-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometry: Comparison with affinity-tag based protein detection and evaluation of different solubilisation methods” Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (2004) 15, 558-567
5. O.K. Bernhard, M.M. Sheil, A.L. Cunningham* “Lateral membrane protein associations of CD4 in lymphoid cells detected by cross-linking and mass spectrometry” Biochemistry (2004), 43, 256-264
6. M.L. Colgrave, J.L. Beck, M.M. Sheil, M.S. Searle,* “Electrospray ionisation mass spectrometric detection of weak non-covalent interactions in nogalamycin-DNA complexes.” Chemical Communications (2002) 556-557
7. S. Vazquez, J.A. Aquilina, J.F. Jamie, M.M. Sheil, R.J. Truscott* “Novel protein modification by kynurenine in human lenses” Journal of Biological Chemistry (2002) 277, 4867-4873
8. A. Kapur, J.L. Beck,* S.E. Brown, N.E. Dixon, M.M. Sheil "Use of electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry to study binding interactions between a replication terminator protein and DNA" Protein Science (2002), 11, 147-157
9. J.L. Beck, M.L. Colgrave, S.F. Ralph, M.M. Sheil* "Electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry of oligonucleotide complexes with drugs, metals, and proteins" Mass Spectrometry Reviews (2001) Mar-Apr, 20, 61-87
10. A. Kapur, J.L. Beck, M.M. Sheil* “Observation of daunomycin and nogalamycin complexes with duplex DNA using electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry.” Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (1999) 13, 2489-2497
11. S.M. Hunt, M.M. Sheil,* M. Belov, P.J. Derrick “Probing the effects of cone potential in the electrospray ion source-consequences for the determination of molecular weight distributions of synthetic polymers” Analytical Chemistry (1998), 70 1812-1822
12. P. Iannitti, M.M. Sheil*, G. Wickham* “High sensitivity and fragmentation specificity in the analysis of drug-DNA adducts by electrospray tandem mass spectrometry” Journal of the American Chemical Society (1997), 119, 1490-1491
13. K.L. Bennett, S.V. Smith, R.J.W. Truscott, M.M. Sheil* “Monitoring papain digestion of a monoclonal antibody by electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry” Analytical Biochemistry (1997), 245, 17-27
14. G. W. Kilby, M. M. Sheil, D. Shaw, J.J. Harding, R. J.W. Truscott* “Amino acid sequence of bovine gamma E(IV) lens crystallin” Protein Science (1997) 6, 909-912
15. K.L. Bennett, S.V. Smith, R.M. Lambrecht, R.J.W. Truscott and M.M. Sheil* “Rapid characterisation of chemically-modified proteins by electrospray mass spectrometry” Bioconjugate Chemistry (1996) 7 12-18
16. G.W. Kilby, G. S. Stutchbury, R.J. Truscott and M.M. Sheil* "Mass spectrometry of Lens Crystallins: Bovine β-crystallins.” Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (1996) 10,123-129
17. G. Wickham, P. Iannitti, J. Boschenok and M.M. Sheil* “Electrospray mass spectrometry of covalent ligand-oligonucleotide adducts: evidence for specific duplex ion formation” Journal of Mass Spectrometry (1995) 30, 197-207
18. M.M. Sheil, M. Guilhaus and P.J. Derrick* “Collision-activated decomposition of peptides by Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance spectrometry” Organic Mass Spectrometry (1990), 25, 671-680
19. G.M. Neumann, M.M. Sheil and P.J. Derrick “Collision-induced decomposition of multiatomic ions.” Z. Naturforsch Teil A. (1984), 39, 584-592

References