[1] She earned her MBBS medical degrees and her MD doctorate from the University of Adelaide.
She was the first woman to be awarded a CJ Martin Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, and with that funding she studied fetal physiology at Oxford University.
She was awarded the degree of DSc in 1986 and became the first woman appointed as a Scientia Professor at UNSW in 1999.
She was elected as Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science and received the Centenary Medal in 2002.
[3] Along with Brian Morris she discovered prorenin, (the protein precursor of renin); her initial findings were met with disbelief from the field, when she began working on it during her doctoral studies.