NSW Health Pathology’s Professor Richard Scolyer AO and his colleague, oncologist Professor Georgina Long AO will share the title of 2024 NSW Australian of the Year.

“Wow, still can’t believe the amaz­ing hon­our of last night being named NSW 2024 Aus­tralian of the Year along­side my incred­i­ble col­league and friend Prof Georgina Long AO,” Richard wrote on social media after the ceremony.

“A trib­ute to all melanoma patients and their fam­i­lies, and brain can­cer patients, as well as the amaz­ing Melanoma Insti­tute team.”

Prof Scoly­er and Prof Long are co-med­ical direc­tors of Melanoma Insti­tute Aus­tralia and have worked togeth­er over many years to save thou­sands of lives from the dead­ly skin can­cer. Now, they have teamed up for a very dif­fer­ent challenge.

They have been treat­ing melanoma using immunother­a­py, which works by acti­vat­ing the patient’s own immune system.

In June this year Richard was diag­nosed with glioblas­toma, an incur­able grade 4 brain cancer.

Richard has now become the world’s first brain can­cer patient to have com­bi­na­tion immunother­a­py, before under­go­ing surgery to remove the tumour in his brain.

The exper­i­men­tal treat­ment brought with it the risk that his life expectan­cy would be fur­ther short­ened, but he recent­ly spoke of his grat­i­tude at being able to advance the under­stand­ing of brain can­cer for the ben­e­fit of future patients.

Richard has shared his can­cer jour­ney open­ly on social media, doc­u­ment­ing his progress and his relent­less­ly pos­i­tive out­look with a world-wide audi­ence of supporters.

Nation­al Aus­tralia Day Coun­cil CEO Mark Fras­er AO CVO con­grat­u­lat­ed all the NSW award recip­i­ents.

“The award recip­i­ents for NSW are an inspir­ing group of peo­ple devot­ed to help­ing oth­ers,” said Mark.

“The break­through work being done by Richard and Georgina, and Richard’s per­son­al sac­ri­fice, is sim­ply extraordinary.”

The pair will be in the run­ning to win 2024 Aus­tralian of the Year, when NSW’s recip­i­ents will join those from oth­er states and ter­ri­to­ries for the nation­al awards cer­e­mo­ny in Can­ber­ra on Thurs­day, 25 Jan­u­ary 2024.

Topics