UNE researchers Professor Steve Walkden-Brown and Adjunct Associate Professor Juliet (Julie) Roberts were honoured at the recent 2023 Australian Poultry Science Symposium. Prof. Walkden-Brown earned the Australian Poultry Award, and the industry acknowledged the historic contribution of Assoc. Prof. Roberts’ (who won the Australian Poultry Award in 2006) with a plaque.

Their citations are reproduced below.

Australian Poultry Award 2022 – Steve Walkden-Brown (pictured receiving his award)

Professor Stephen Walkden-Brown graduated as a veterinarian from the University of Queensland in 1981 and spent 1982 in Sydney working in the poultry industry before returning home to Fiji as Governement veterinarian.

Six years later he migrated to Australia and undertook a PhD at UQ on on reproduction in Australian Cashmere Goats completing that in 1992. After a post doc at the University of Western Australia working on sheep/goat reproduction Steve was appointed as a lecturer in Animal Science at UNE in late 1995. There he became inspired to work with poultry again by observing the devastating effects of Marek’s Disease in the caged layer breed comparison work at UNE with Rob Cumming, Julie Roberts and John Nolan. He was successful in obtaining two Australian Research Council grants on various aspects of Marek’s Disease in association with Baiada Poultry, Peter Groves Fakhrul Islam Peter Young and later Greg Underwood.

Steve’s team established MDV culture capability, developed the first PCRs to differentiate MDV1, MDV2 and HVT with another ARC grant in 2003 obtained the first real-time PCR machine in Armidale and was able to use these tests to to quantify MDV in poultry dust, enabling industry to evaluate the outcome of MDV vaccination programs, especially in broilers. Steve also instigated pathotyping of Australian MDV strains and putting them into an international context.

Steve was instrumental in establishing the UNE isolator facility for infectious disease studies which was opened in 2004 and used, initially, for the MDV work but has since been used for at least another 40 studies. Steve has had a strong history of collaborative research from the start. The molecular approach to monitoring for MDV has been well adopted for both surveillance and diagnostic purposes. The ability to model MDV kinetics using qPCR of tissues and dust gave rise to an invitation for Steve to go to BBSRC Institute for Animal Health, Compton UK to work with Drs Venugopal Nair and Andrew Read on the evolution of virulence of MDV. Steve’s work was one of the first to demonstrate the immunosuppressive effects of MDV infection – in this case against E. coli challenge.

The environmental sampling techniques developed by Steve for MDV were subsequently applied for detection in dust of ILTV, IBDV, FAdV and IBV. Steve won an AgriFutures grant with Peter Groves in 2019 to use dust testing (population level test) and individual bird swabbing (individual test) to track ILTV kinetics following vaccination. Steve worked with Priscilla Gerber to explore detection in the field following vaccination against a dozen diseases and noted that to date they have not found a pathogen that cannot be detected in poultry dust following vaccination or known infection.

More recent work on gastrointestinal nematode infection in free range layers showed no evidence of anthelmintic resistance in free range flocks and developed in vitro methods of testing for this. The field prevalence survey of nematode infection levels in Australia was also established. Steve has also completed an AgriFutures project on haemorrhagic enteritis virus in turkeys. His tream was able to propagate it, isolate Australian strains, and determined that it is highly seroprevalent in our turkeys, without a lot of clinical disease.

Steve has also made substantial service contributions to poultry through his membership of AVPA and WPSA and has been treasurer of WPSA since 2009. Steve has over 400 scientific publications including 140 refereed original scientific publications. He has supervised 33 PhD, 11 Masters and 23 Honours students to completion with several of these going on to make significant contributions to the poultry industries in Australia or their home countries.

Professor Walkden-Brown has investigated and helped control a range of important poultry pathogens during his career and has presented his findings regularly at industry forums such as the APSS and AVPA meetings. Without his work, the Australian poultry industry would have suffered more prolonged disease problems and struggled with prompt control. For this legacy, Steve is a worthy recipient of the Australian Poultry Award 2022.

Dr Juliet Roberts – Industry acknowledgement of service from World Poultry Science Association and Poultry Research Foundation, read by Steve Walkden-Brown: