'I wouldn't trade getting cancer for anything': UOW grad's remarkable story

"I was a mediocre student at best, I'd just be passing all my subjects, I just wanted to go out to skateboard and surf," the University of Wollongong student said.

"In fact, the first thing I said, the first week of my cancer diagnosis, was that best thing about having cancer is not having to go to school."

Mr Roughley was 14 when he got sick with two aggressive types of blood cancer - acute lymphoblastic leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia, which together are called mixed phenotype leukemia.

And he underwent months of treatment, his view on education rapidly changed.

"The diagnosis pretty much steered me into medical science, because I realised that I'm literally only here because of people putting in the hard yards and contributing to medical science," he said.

Now 24, Mr Roughley this week graduated from his second degree - a Bachelor of Science (Honours), majoring in biomolecular physics.

At one of the ceremonies held on Tuesday, he was also awarded the University Medal for the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, which goes to the top performing student in each year.

While he remembers his treatment for leukaemia as like being "at the gates of hell, more or less," he counts himself lucky that he survived cancer so young, as it set him on a different trajectory.

"It was one of the best things that ever happened in my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything," he said.

"You really can't learn what I learnt in other aspects of life, or it's a lot harder to anyway, because you need to be forced to see that you really on borrowed time and you need to make the most of it."

He said his interest in science was piqued when would watch doctors doing his blood work.

"They would talk about certain things in the blood test, and they'd be like, oh, what's that? So I'd start researching it," he said.

"I borrowed a textbook from one of my oncologists, and then that just kind of opened the doors.

"Since I was a product of what research could do, I was fascinated with the possibilities of medical research and so I decided I wanted to be a scientist, and a medical researcher."

With two degrees under his belt, Mr Roughley is now two months into a PhD, working in the field of targeted nanotechnologies.

"I'm investigating is how diet influences brain cancer therapies because as a patient, you just sit there and you get treated and there's not really much involvement," he said.

"Everything's happening to you and you don't really get a say. Diet was not emphasized at all during my treatment, I was just told 'don't lose weight' and that's why I'm really passionate about this.

"I want to contribute to the forefront and forefront of research and advance the field that way."