Canberra Science Calendar

The January image was taken when the Cassini spacecraft was directly opposite the plane of Saturn's rings which appear as a horizontal black line, their shadow draping across the northern hemisphere. The moon Rhea (1,528 km diameter) hangs below the rings, the black spot on the upper left is the shadow of the moon Mimas (396 km diameter).

Red, green and blue filters combined to create this natural color image in June 2007 when Cassini was approximately 1.7 million km from Saturn.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. More information from the mission is online. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Professor November is Ian Chubb, Australia's Chief Scientist, pictured with ANU students at a seminar he gave on Leadership in Science as part of a Leadership and Influence course.

Ian's studies began at Monash University and then the University of Ghent in Belgium before he earned a Master of Science, Master of Arts (Status) and a PhD at Oxford University. He returned to Australia to take up a position as associate professor in the School of Medicine at Flinders University, followed by positions as deputy vice chancellor at Wollongong and Monash universities before returning to Flinders as vice chancellor. He then served as vice chancellor of the ANU where he established the Vice Chancellor's courses, including the Leadership and Influence course.

You can find out more online about the work of the Chief Scientist and the ANU Vice Chancellor's courses.

Photo credit: Stuart Hay

Professor September is Mike Gore, the founder of Questacon. Mike taught Physics at the ANU for 25 years, but that wasn't enough to fulfill his desire to promote science education and raise scientific awareness amongst the wider population.

With the support of the ANU he established Questacon, Australia's first interactive science education centre, in a disused school building in Canberra. In the late 1980s it moved into its new home on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, the National Science and Technology Centre, which has become a must-visit venue for school students and their parents ever since.

Mike is now an Adjunct Professor in Science Communication at the ANU's Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Students studying for a Master of Science Communication (Outreach) degree at the centre develop their teaching and communication skills with full-on practical experience by going on the road with the Shell Questacon Science Circus.

A long standing partnership between Questacon, Shell Australia and the ANU, every year the circus visits schools and towns in regional and remote Australia to engage young Australians with science through entertaining and challenging performances, just like Mike has done ever since he started teaching science.

You can find out more online.

Photo credit: Tim Wetherell

Dr July is John Connor of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy where he is supervising PhD student Emily Robertson.

John gained a degree at the ANU and a Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of Canberra before lecturing in history at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King's College London, in 2003–4. After gaining his PhD at UNSW in 2004 he was appointed Senior Historian at the Australian War Memorial and since 2007 has been a Senior Lecturer in history at UNSW@ADFA.

Emily's experience as an art curator at the Australian War Memorial, which has an extensive collection of wartime posters, drove her interest in Australian wartime propaganda. Her thesis will trace the development of government and non-government propaganda in Australia in the First World War and investigate the public response. It will build on her 2010 Masters thesis from the ANU which focused on the perversion of Darwinian notions in posters which could portray the German enemy as a sub-human 'ape'.

You can find out more about UNSW’s Graduate Research School and see a collection of WW1 posters online.

Photo credit: David Paterson

Based at CSIRO's Black Mountain precinct, our Doctor Mays and their protégés are investigating the nation's biodiversity.

As a small lad from Auckland, Dr Andrew Young dreamt of becoming a world class rugby player until he discovered ecology. After completing a Bachelor and Master of Science in Botany at the University of Auckland, Andrew spent four years being bitten by chipmunks as he investigated the ecology and genetics of beech-maple woodlands for his PhD at Carleton University, Ontario.

This led to him scoring a position with CSIRO Plant Industry to research how Australia's native plant biodiversity can be conserved in farming landscapes. In addition to his ecological research Andrew supervises students from a number of Australian universities, including Tara Hopley who is in the final stages of her PhD with the Australian National University.

Tara's research involved many field trips in Victoria's high country sampling willow trees and mapping the seed dispersal within the Ovens River catchment. She did not expect the broad range of experiences and training she encountered while in the field - like a water-bombing helicopter filling up about 10m from where she was working: "A PhD not only provides great training in scientific research but training in life too".

Tara Konarzewski has also had interesting encounters while doing research in the field for her PhD into the genetic diversity of Paterson's Curse across different climates and how it may respond to changes in climate. Collecting samples along the Monaro Highway near Canberra one day, she attracted the attention of seven police cars carrying 13 Kevlar-clad police officers. "A simple misunderstanding made everyday field work feel like being in an action movie!"

Tara's PhD is co-supervised by Dr Brad Murray at the University of Technology Sydney and CSIRO supervisor Dr Bob Godfree. Bob grew up in northwest NSW on a small farm where he developed a great interest in how plant species and communities respond to extreme climatic events – especially droughts.

He gained a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in environmental science and biology at Macquarie University in Sydney before undertaking a PhD in Plant Ecology at Portland State University, Oregon, looking at the effects of topography and disease on forest dynamics.

He returned to Australia to take up a Post Doctoral Fellowship at CSIRO Plant Industry where he conducts a wide range of ecological research, including climate-plant interactions.

Our featured scientist for March is Dr Jane Sexton, Leader of Geoscience Australia’s Natural Hazard Impacts Project, with colleague Dr Adele Bear-Crozier.

At the University of Queensland Jane gained an Honours Degree Bachelor of Science in 1993 and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1998. After undertaking postdoctoral research at the University of Sydney she worked for the Defence Science Technology Organisation before joining Geoscience Australia in 2005.

Jane’s work is currently focused on modelling the tsunami risk facing selected Australian communities and communicating the outputs to emergency managers and the public.

Adele gained an Honours Degree Bachelor of Science from Monash University in 2004. She then undertook a PhD in physical volcanology jointly between Monash and Universita di Roma Tre in Italy where her research focused on explosive volcanoes.

She joined Geoscience Australia as part of the Graduate Program in 2009 and is now involved in computational modelling of volcanic hazards in Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea to provide assessments of the potential impact volcanoes have on regional communities living at risk.

Geoscience Australia’s Natural Hazard Impacts Project is looking at a range of natural hazards – such as earthquake, flood, landslide, volcano and tsunami – and how they may impact the Australian community.

You can find out more about the Natural Hazard Impacts Project online.

Professor January is Andrew Blakers (right), with PhD candidate Soe Zin and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Marta Vivar.

Andrew gained his PhD at the University of NSW and spent two years at the Max Planck Institute in Germany before joining the ANU where he is Director of the Centre Sustainable Energy Systems and the ARC Centre for Solar Energy Systems. One of Australia's leading renewable energy researchers, Andrew led the development of sliver photovoltaic cells to reduce the volume of silicon required to generate electricity from the sun’s energy.

Soe gained a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Portsmouth in the UK and a Masters at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, before joining Andrew’s team in 2007 as a PhD student. His career goal is to pioneer new technologies and process innovations so that solar electricity is cheaper than electricity generated by coal-fired systems.

At Madrid’s Universidad Politécnica, Marta gained a degree in Telecommunications Engineering and a Diploma of Education before completing a PhD in which she researched methods to optimize the performance of photovoltaic concentrators. As a postdoc fellow in Andrew's team since 2009 she is developing new systems and concepts for concentration technologies.

You can find out more about the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems and the ARC Centre for Solar Energy Systems online.

As Director of the Australian Plague Locust Commission, Chris Adriaansen's work focuses on three native Australian insects - the Australian plague locust, the spur-throated locust, and the migratory locust. Funded by the Australian, New South Wales, Victorian, South Australian and Queensland governments, the APLC monitors locust populations year-round and coordinates control measures to manage outbreaks that can cause significant damage to crops and pastures in spring, summer and early autumn.

You can find out more about the APLC (and locusts) online.

Professor September is Richard Norris, Director of the Institute for Applied Ecology and leader of the eWater Education and Training Program at the University of Canberra.

For more than 30 years Richard's research has focused on invertebrate animals which spend all or part of their lives in freshwater. Their abundance and biodiversity are primary measures of the ecological health of rivers and wetlands, enabling Richard and his colleagues to assess the health of freshwater environments and provide evidence-based strategies to improve their management.

You can find out more about the Institute for Applied Ecology online.

Professor July is Arno Müllbacher who leads the Viral Immunology Group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the ANU.

Arno has been working with the influenza virus for a long time. More than 25 years ago his research showed that exposing the virus to gamma radiation destroys its genetic material but leaves all viral structures and internal proteins intact. He hypothesized that this could provide the basis of a flu vaccine which would be effective against any strain of the virus. He is now a director of Gamma Vaccines, a start-up company which is developing the technology.

You can find out more about Gamma Vaccines online.

Professor May is Arthur Georges, Professor of Applied Ecology and Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of Canberra, joined by PhD student Carla Eisemberg and a Murray River Turtle. Arthur’s research is focused on the conservation biology of native Australasian species, sex determination in dragons, and the ecology of Australian reptiles and amphibians. Carla is researching the ecology of the Pig-nosed Turtle of the Kikori River in southern Papua New Guinea where she is working with local people to develop conservation strategies for the turtle and its habitat.

You can learn more about their work online and use the Turtlebase tool which provides information on the distribution of Australasian freshwater turtles.

Professor March is Iain Gordon, leader of CSIRO’s new Biodiversity Theme: Building Resilient Australian Biodiversity Assets.

Coordinating research across several CSIRO Divisions, this project is deepening our understanding of how species like the Goliath Stick Insect (Eurycnema goliath) interact with others to maintain healthy ecosystems. It is also working to support biodiversity through fostering and maintaining a balance between human development and conservation.

You can learn more about the CSIRO’s Biodiversity Theme online.

Professor January is Jenny Graves, leader of the Comparative Genomics group at the ANU’s Research School of Biological Sciences and deputy director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics.

Jenny’s work focuses on mapping the genomes of Australian marsupials and comparing them with genomes of humans and other animals to track the processes of evolution which shaped the species which now populate our world. By the end of the year, the red-necked wallaby joey she met at Canberra’s RSPCA will be hopping around the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve.

You can learn more about Jenny and her work online.

Ted hosted a seminar at one of his favourite Canberra watering holes with the winners of the 2009 PM’s Prizes for Science – John O’Sullivan, Amanda Barnard, Len Altman, Allan Whittome, and Michael Cowley.

You can learn more about the PM’s Prizes for Science online.

Professor September is Ian Frazer, co-inventor of a vaccine against strains of the Human Papillomavirus responsible for cervical cancer and Director of the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland.

Ted and Ian met at the Therapeutic Goods Administration which was responsible for approving the vaccine for release in Australia.

You can learn more about Ian and the Diamantina Institute online.

Professor July is Robin Batterham, President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and Doctor July is Margaret Hartley, the Academy’s Chief Executive.

They met Ted at the Einstein sculpture outside Questacon, one of Ted’s favourite Canberra science venues.

You can learn more about the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering online.

Professor May is Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, and Dr May is Sue Meek, Chief Executive of the Academy. They met Ted at the Academy’s headquarters where the annual Science at the Shine Dome event is held in the first week of May.

Learn more about Science at the Shine Dome online.

Professor March is Sir Gustav Nossal whose outstanding career as a researcher, administrator and advocate for science has earned him many awards and the respect of his colleagues and the Australian public.

Gus and Ted met at the National Press Club for the launch of a report by the Australian Society for Medical Research which detailed the exceptional gains in life expectancy and wellbeing delivered by Australian health research.

One of Gus’s recent projects is the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. http://www.ni.unimelb.edu.au/

Professor January is Frank Fenner, Australia’s most respected and decorated scientist. Frank and Ted occasionally lunch at the Lookout Café on Red Hill where January’s picture was taken.

Learn more about Professor Fenner’s achievements and contribution to Australian science.