Michelle Bootcov
PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Humanities & Languages
Email: m.bootcov@unsw.edu.au
Supervisors: Alison Bashford, Nicolas Rasmussen
Michelle Bootcov’s PhD research is on viral hepatitis and its late 20th century role in the transformation of viral diagnostics, the blood industry and public health.
Michelle has a background in science and history. She completed a BSc (Hons) in molecular biology in 1986 (Wits University, South Africa). In her PhD in molecular immunology (St Vincent’s Hospital and UNSW, 1994) she discovered a cytokine, MIC-1, which is also known as GDF-15. The bioinformatics she used in that research diverted her to corporate technology for two decades before she returned to UNSW to study the humanities, completing a BA (Hons) in History in 2018.
- Research area
- Research outputs
History of medical science
- M Bootcov, ‘Gregory Morgan, Cancer Virus Hunters: A History of Tumor Virology’, [Review], Health and History, 25:2 (2023) 115-117.
- M Bootcov, ‘Neeraja Sankaran, A Tale of Two Viruses: Parallels in the Research Trajectories of Tumor and Bacterial Viruses’, [Review], Journal of the History of Biology, (2023) 1-3.
- Stephen Colagiuri and Michelle Bootcov [Eds.], Stephen, Roger Wilkinson, Catherine Storey, et al, ‘100 Years of Insulin in Australia’, Health and History, 25:1 (2023) 92-112. 10.1353/hah.2023.a904714.
- Iva Glisic, Samantha Owen, Parisa Shams, Kelly Bailey, Michelle Bootcov et al., ‘Editorial. The Female Frame: Biopolitics and Wellbeing in Australian and Global Perspective’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 27 (2021) 175-176.
- M Bootcov, ‘Bruce Small, the Mr Big of women’s cycling in interwar Australia’, Sporting Traditions, 37:2 (2020) 115-136.
- M Bootcov, ‘Australian female endurance cyclists of the 1930s and the commercialization of their athletic femininity’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 36:15-16 (2020) 1433-1456, DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2020.1713107.
- M Bootcov ‘ ”We in our loneliness set our entire hope upon Australia”: The Quaker Collection’, Journal of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia.
- M Bootcov, ‘Dr George On Lee (葉七秀): Not just a medical practitioner in colonial Australia’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, 8 (2019) 82-101.
- MR Bootcov, AR Bauskin, SM Valenzuela, et al, ‘MIC-1, a novel macrophage inhibitory cytokine, is a divergent member of the TGF-β superfamily’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94:21 (1997) 11514-11519, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.94.21.11514.
- SM Valenzuela, DK Martin, SB Por, JM Robbins, K Warton, MR Bootcov, et al, ‘Molecular cloning and expression of a chloride ion channel of cell nuclei’ Journal of Biological Chemistry, 272: 19 (1997) 12575-12582.
- DK Martin, MR Bootcov, TJ Campbell, PW French, SN Breit, ‘Human macrophages contain a stretch-sensitive potassium channel that is activated by adherence and cytokines’, The Journal of Membrane Biology, 147:3 (1995) 305-315.