Tag Archives: innovation

Top 25 insights: venture capital

March 9, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

All research and development (R&D) spin-offs have significant risk attached to their commercialisation, but some cannot overcome the negative perception of that risk to attract the necessary capital.

Here, nine of the Top 25 Science meets Business R&D spin-off companies explain what it was about their product or business strategy that inspired confidence in their investors that theirs would be a viable business venture.

ACRUX DDS PTY LTD

“An excellent intellectual property position is a key starting point. This is in addition to having a proven concept or great technology. A quality team to back up project execution is paramount. Understanding and being able to explain where your commercialised projects will fit into a market segment in terms of the need they will meet is also important.”

– Michael Kotsanis, Chief Executive Officer

SMARTCAP TECHNOLOGIES PTY LTD

“SmartCap Technologies is a spinoff from CRCMining. CRCMining carries out industry directed research, which ensured that the research into fatigue management technologies was a high priority for the mining industry at the project’s inception.

In SmartCap’s case, the industry support was sufficiently high that Anglo American, one of the world’s largest mining companies, in conjunction with CRCMining, co-funded the development of the prototype commercial SmartCap products.

This ‘incubation’ of the SmartCap technology by a significant end user was extremely important to advancing from research into prototype products.

The prototype products performed sufficiently well for SmartCap to be selected by two other large mining companies for large supply contracts for fatigue monitoring technology.

So the support of significant end users, along with the commercial contracts the company had in place at that time, provided potential investors with the confidence to invest in SmartCap Technologies.”

– Kevin Greenwood, Chief Operating Officer

PHARMAXIS LTD

“Pharmaxis has been restructured following a regulatory setback for our lead product. Rebuilding investor confidence has been critical to our longer term success. To do this we focused on three things:

1. transparency – explaining the business model and being clear about the risks as well as the opportunity;

2. building in meaningful milestones which marked development steps that significantly reduced risk and provided opportunities to realise value;

3. hitting milestones and delivering realistic objectives.”

– Gary J Phillips, Chief Executive Officer

ADMEDUS

“I think there are a number of reasons investors are drawn to our business: Admedus has two technology platforms which diversifies the risk for investors; we have a product on market; and we are generating revenue.

The first of the two platforms is our regenerative tissue platform, where we use our proprietary ADAPT tissue engineering process to turn xenograft tissue into collagen bio-scaffolds for soft tissue repair. The second is our Immunotherapies platform, where we work with renowned scientist Professor Ian Frazer and his team to develop therapeutic vaccines for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancers.

Our lead regenerative tissue product CardioCel, which is used to repair and reconstruct congenital heart deformities and more complex heart defects, has made the journey from prototype to commercial product and is on the market in the USA, Europe and parts of Asia.

Frazer’s previous success with the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) program that lead to the USD$2 billion product, Gardasil, is well-recognised and gives investors further confidence in our immunotherapy work.

As a result, Admedus has a good balance of validated science via approved products and an exciting product pipeline working with successful scientists. This balance, along with our diversified program portfolio, gives investors confidence in our business. “

– Dr Julian Chick, Chief Operating Officer

REDFLOW

“1. Marketing Potential

2. Uniqueness of the product

3. Difficult to replicate”

– Stuart Smith, Chief Executive Officer

CATAPULT GROUP INTERNATIONAL LTD

“Catapult‘s initial funding came from the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), the birthplace of the project that led to the commercialisation of Catapult, and the Australian government.

Because the technology was engineered to take elite athlete monitoring from the laboratory to the field, value was seen in the data immediately as there was no precedent for this type of information. A new product category had been formed and Australian Olympians were now able to train in their performance sweet spot without getting injured because their coaches had objective data to guide their lead up to big events.

So this combination of pioneering a new industry in a popular space (elite sport), with the ability to create immediate value, certainly helped with the initial funding.”

– Shaun Holthouse, Chief Executive Officer

SPINIFEX PHARAMCEUTICALS PTY LTD

“Neuropathic pain is a large unmet medical need because the currently available drug treatments either lack efficacy and/or have dose-limiting side-effects.

Due to this, my patent-protected angiotensin II type 2 (AT₂) receptor antagonist technology – encompassing a potentially first-in-class novel analgesic for the treatment of often intractable neuropathic pain conditions – attracted initial seed capital investment from the Symbiosis Group, GBS Ventures and Uniseed Pty Ltd. In total $3.25M was raised and in mid-2005 the spin-out company, Spinifex Pharmaceuticals was formed by UniQuest Pty Ltd, the main commercialisation company of The University of Queensland.

The raison d’etre for Spinifex Pharmaceuticals at that time was to develop AT₂ receptor antagonists as efficacious, well-tolerated first-in-class novel analgesics for relief of neuropathic pain.

In 2006, I discovered that AT₂ receptor antagonists also alleviated chronic inflammatory pain in a rat model. This was quite unexpected as clinically available drug treatments for neuropathic pain, such as tricyclic antidepressants and newer work-alikes as well as gabapentin and pregabalin, do not alleviate chronic inflammatory pain conditions such as osteoarthritis. Thus the potential for small molecule AT₂ receptor antagonists to alleviate chronic inflammatory pain conditions was patent protected by UniQuest Pty Ltd in 2006 and subsequently in-licensed to Spinifex Pharmaceuticals for commercialisation.

As both neuropathic pain and chronic inflammatory pain are large unmet medical needs, Spinifex Pharmaceuticals was able to raise additional venture capital from the initial investors as well as from Brandon Capital to fund Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) toxicology and safety pharmacology studies, as well as early phase human clinical trials. “

– Professor Maree Smith, Executive Director of the Centre for Integrated Preclinical Drug Development and Head of the Pain Research Group at The University of Queensland

iCETANA

“A different technique or approach to tackling a large and growing global market opportunity.”

– Gary Pennefather, Chief Executive Officer

ENGENEIC LTD

“Investors understood that the intellectual property would be generated in-house and there was no “stacking” from the beginning.

We were fortunate at the outset to meet two venture capitalists and a number of high net worth individuals who saw the potential upside in our business plan, had already had some success with investing in biotech – e.g. Biota – and did not ask ‘who else is in?’.

That being said, we had very limited time and money to show proof of concept, and only after that and our first patent, did we convince those investors that we had something viable.”

– Dr Jennifer Macdiarmid, pictured above with Dr. Himanshu Brahmbhatt, joint Chief Executive Officers and Directors

Click here to see the full list of Top 25 Science meets Business R&D spin-off companies.

Features, Innovation, News, Technology, Top 25 R&D

Top 25 R&D spin-offs

March 7, 2016 Heather Catchpole 4 Comments

For a country that makes up just 0.3% of the world’s population, Australia packs a heavyweight punch in science – generating 3.9% of the world’s research publications. However taking that research to market has proved a broader challenge.

Fostering the commercialisation of research success and encouraging collaboration between industry and researchers is at the forefront of the government’s renewed focus on scientific innovation, with over $1.1 billion earmarked to kickstart the “ideas boom” as part of the National Innovation and Science Agenda.

“Collaboration is key to turning Australian ideas into viable and lucrative commercial products and services,” says Christopher Pyne, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, adding that high-tech knowhow plus innovative R&D will drive jobs and wealth in the future.

“We must capitalise on the opportunities that are presenting themselves in the economic transition taking place in Australia by being agile, innovative and creative,” Pyne says.

He notes a range of measures, including the $155 million Industry Growth Fund and the R&D Tax Incentive program, are supporting firms to innovate and drive investment into new high-growth industry sectors.

From industry-funded ventures to university spin-offs and rising star start-ups, these are the Science Meets Business Top 25 Australian research and development spin-off companies.

Click here to see the full list, or continue reading. For further insights from the leaders of the Top 25 R&D spin-off companies, read their interviews on attracting venture capital, learning from overseas markets, getting past the valley of death, overcoming major start-up challenges and starting up.

1 FIBROTECH THERAPEUTICS PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: Darren Kelly

SOLD FOR: US$557.5 million

INNOVATION RATIO*: 0.15

Fibrotech develops novel drug candidates to treat fibrosis (tissue scarring) associated with chronic conditions such as heart failure, kidney and pulmonary disease, and arthritis. The company spun out of research by Professor Darren Kelly at the University of Melbourne in 2006, and its principal asset is a molecule, FT011, which helps prevent kidney fibrosis associated with diabetes. In May 2014, in one of Australia’s biggest biotech deals at the time, Fibrotech was acquired by Shire, a Dublin-based pharmaceutical company, for an initial payment of US$75 million. Further payments, based on a series of milestones, will bring the total value of the sale to US$557.5 million, and the deal was awarded Australia’s best early stage venture capital deal in 2014. At the time of the sale, FT011 was in Phase 1b trials for the treatment of renal impairment in diabetics – a market worth US$4 billion annually.

*Innovation ratio = patents published/cited

Founder, CEO & director of Fibrotech Therapeutics, Professor Darren Kelly

2 SPINIFEX PHARMACEUTICALS PTY LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $264 million

CEO/President: Dr Tom McCarthy

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.13

SOLD FOR: acquired by Novartis for US$200 million up-front payment plus milestone payments

Spinifex Pharmaceuticals was launched in 2005 to commercialise chronic pain treatments developed by Professor Maree Smith of The University of Queensland. Pharmaceuticals giant Novartis acquired the company in 2015 for a total of US$725 million, based on the promising results in Phase 1b and Phase 2 clinical trials. Spinifex’s treatment targets nerve receptors on peripheral nerves rather than pain receptors in the brain, making it possible to treat the pain from causes such as shingles, chemotherapy, diabetes and osteoarthritis without central nervous system side-effects such as tiredness and dizziness.

CEO/President of Spinifex Pharmaceuticals, Dr Tom McCarthy

3 ADMEDUS LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $61.88 million

COO: Julian Chick

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.02

REVENUE: $10.2 million

Admedus is a diversified healthcare company with interests in vaccines, regenerative medicine, and the sale and distribution of medical devices and consumables. Currently, the company is developing vaccines for herpes simplex virus and human papillomavirus based on Professor Ian Frazer’s groundbreaking vaccine technology. In the regenerative medicine field, Admedus is the vendor of CardioCel®, an innovative single-ply bio-scaffold that can be used in the treatment of congenital heart deformities and complex heart defects.

BIG 3 – RESMED LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $7.85 billion

CEO: Michael J Farrell

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.02

REVENUE: $1.68 billion

For more than 25 years, ResMed has been a pioneer in the treatment of sleep-disordered breathing, obstructive pulmonary disease and other chronic diseases. The company was founded in 1989 after Professor Colin Sullivan and University of Sydney colleagues developed nasal continuous positive airway pressure – the first successful, non-invasive treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea. Today, the company employs more than 4000 people in over 100 countries, delivering treatment to millions of people worldwide.

4 BIODIEM LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO/Executive Director: Julie Phillips

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.22

REVENUE: $203,809

BioDiem specialises in the development and commercialisation of vaccines and therapies to treat infectious diseases. The Live Attenuated Influenza Virus vaccine technology provides a platform for developing vaccines, including one for both seasonal and pandemic influenza. BioDiem’s subsidiary, Opal Biosciences, is developing BDM-I, a compound that offers a possible avenue for the treatment of infectious diseases that resist all known drugs.

5 VAXXAS PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO/Director: David Hoey

Vaxxas is pioneering a needle-free vaccine delivery system, the Nanopatch, which delivers vaccines to the abundant immunological cells just under the skin’s surface. Preclinical studies have shown that vaccines are effective with as little as one-hundredth of a conventional dose when delivered via a Nanopatch. In 2014, Vaxxas was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, based on the potential of Nanopatch to transform global health.

6 ACRUX DDS PTY LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $122.39 million

CEO: Michael Kotsanis

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.01

REVENUE: $25.4 million

Biotech company Acrux was incorporated in 1998 after researchers at Monash University developed an effective new spray-on drug delivery technology that improved absorption through the skin and nails. In 2010, Acrux struck a US$335 million deal with global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly for AxironTM, a treatment for testosterone deficiency in men. It was the largest single product licensing agreement in the history of Australian biotechnology.

CEO of Acrux, Michael Kotsanis

7 PHARMAXIS LTD

MARKET VALUE: $72.9 million

CEO: Gary J Phillips

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.76

REVENUE: $59.25 million

Listed on the ASX in 2003, Pharmaxis has two products on the market: Bronchitol, a treatment for cystic fibrosis; and Aridol, a lung function test to diagnose and assess asthma. In 2015, Pharmaxis sold the rights to a treatment for the liver condition nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, to Boehringer Ingelheim in a deal that could be worth US$750 million.

CEO of Pharmaxis, Gary J Phillips

8 OPTHEA PTY LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $42.80 million

CEO/MD: Dr Megan Baldwin

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.01

REVENUE: $939,008

With a focus on ophthalmology, Opthea’s main product is OPT-302 – a treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration – which is currently in a Phase 1/2a clinical trial. Wet macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. Opthea was formerly known as Circadian Technologies, acting as a biotechnology investment fund before transitioning to developing drugs in 2008.

9 BENITIC BIOPHARMA LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $63.01 million

CEO: Greg West

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.14

REVENUE: $1.37 million

Benitec Biopharma’s leading product is DNA-directed RNA interference (ddRNAi) – a platform for silencing unwanted genes as a treatment for a wide range of genetic conditions. ddRNAi has broad applications, and can assist with conditions as diverse as neurological, infectious and autoimmune diseases, as well as cancers. The company’s current focus inludes hepatitis B and C, wet age-related macular degeneration and lung cancer.

10 CATAPULT GROUP INTERNATIONAL LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: ~$256 million

CEO: Shaun Holthouse

REVENUE: $11.8 million

Catapult makes athletic performance monitoring systems using global and local positioning technologies for more than 750 elite teams, universities and institutions worldwide. The technology was commercialised in 2006 and its IPO in December 2014 raised more than $12 million from investors – including from US billionaire Mark Cuban.

CEO of Catapult, Shaun Holthouse

11 SMARTCAP TECHNOLOGIES PTY LTD

CEO: Dush Wimal

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.03

TYPE: NOT LISTED

Using a wearable electroencephalograph (EEG), SmartCap monitors driver fatigue by measuring changes in brain activity without significant discomfort or inconvenience. It notifies users when they are fatigued and what time of day they’re most at risk. SmartCap was formally EdanSafe, a CRCMining spin-off company.

CEO of Smartcap Technologies, Dush Wimal

BIG 3 – COCHLEAR LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $4.8 billion

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.05

CEO/PRESIDENT: Chris Smith

REVENUE: $925.6 million

Cochlear delivers hearing to over 400,000 people worldwide through products like the cochlear implant. Pioneered by the University of Melbourne’s Professor Graeme Clark and developed with assistance from The HEARing CRC, the bionic devices were first successfully implanted by the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital for people with moderate to profound hearing loss. The global company now employs 2800 staff and assists people in 100 countries.

CEO/President of Cochlear, Chris Smith

12 ECOULT PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: John Wood

Founded by the CSIRO in 2007 to commercialise the UltraBattery, Ecoult was acquired by the East Penn Manufacturing Company in 2010. The UltraBattery makes it possible to smooth out the peaks and troughs in renewable power, functioning efficiently in a state of partial charge for extended periods.

13 QUICKSTEP HOLDINGS LTD

MARKET VALUE: $87.09 million

CEO/MD: David Marino

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.04

REVENUE: $39.51 million

Composite materials company Quickstep was founded in 2001 to commercialise their patented manufacturing process. Working with the aerospace, automotive and defence industries, Quickstep supplies advanced carbon fibre composite panels for high technology vehicles. In 2015, the company increased its manufacturing capacity, establishing an automotive production site in Victoria in addition to their aerospace production site in NSW.

14 ENGENEIC LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

JOINT CEOs/DIRECTORS: Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt

MARKET VALUE: $178 million

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.03

EnGeneIC’s cancer treatment platform, the EnGeneIC Dream Vector (EDV TM), is a first-in-class cytoimmunotherapy.

The EDV is a nanocell mechanism for delivering drugs and functional nucleic acids and can target tumours without coming into contact with normal cells, greatly reducing toxicity. Above all, the EDV therapeutic stimulates the adaptive immune response, thereby enhancing anti-tumour efficacy. More than 260 patents support the technology, developed entirely by EnGeneIC, giving the company control over its application.

Joint CEOs and directors of EnGeneIC, Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt

15 SNAP NETWORK SURVEILLANCE PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: Simon Langsford

CTO/FOUNDER: Dr Henry Detmold

Snap’s FMx is a unique approach to video surveillance that forms cameras into a network based on artificial intelligence that learns relationships between what the cameras can see. It enables advanced real-time tracking and easier compilation of video evidence. Developed at the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Visual Technologies, the system is operational at customer sites in Australia, Europe and North America.

16 ORTHOCELL LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $32.89 million

MD: Paul Anderson

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.81

REVENUE: $1.69 million

Orthocell develops innovative technologies for treating tendon, cartilage and soft tissue injuries. Its Ortho-ATI™ and Ortho-ACI™ therapies, for damaged tendons and cartilage, use the patient’s cells to assist treatments. Its latest product, CelGro™, is a collagen scaffold for soft tissue and bone regeneration.

17 REDFLOW

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $111.3 million

CEO: Stuart Smith

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.16

REVENUE: $265,436

As the demand for effective energy storage grows, RedFlow’s zinc-bromide flow batteries are gaining attention. RedFlow has outsourced its manufacturing to North America to keep up with demand, while the company’s research and development continues in Brisbane.

CEO of Redflow, Stuart Smith

18 MINIFAB PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: Dr Erol Harvey

INNOVATION RATIO: 2

Since 2002, precision engineering company MiniFAB has completed more than 900 projects for customers across the globe. MiniFAB provides a complete design and manufacturing service, and has developed polymer microfluidic and microengineered devices for medical and diagnostic products, environmental monitoring, food packaging and aerospace.

19 RAYGEN RESOURCES PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: Robert Cart

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.74

RayGen’s power generation method involves an ultra high efficiency array of photovoltaic cells, which receive focused solar energy from heliostats (mirrors) that track the sun, resulting in high performance at low cost. In December 2014, RayGen and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) collaborated to produce the highest ever efficiency for the conversion of sunlight into electricity. The independently verified result of 40.4% efficiency for the advanced system is a game changer, now rivalling the performance of conventional fossil power generation.

CEO of RayGen Resources, Robert Cart

BIG 3 – CSL LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $44.93 billion

CEO/MD: Paul Perreault

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.05

REVENUE: US$5.6 million

CSL is Australia’s largest biotechnology company, employing over 14,000 people across 30 countries. The company began in 1916, when the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories was founded in Melbourne. It was incorporated in 1991, and listed on the ASX in 1994. Since that time, CSL has acquired established plasma protein maker CSL Behring, and Novartis’ influenza vaccine business, and has become a global leader in the research, manufacture and marketing of biotherapies.

20 CARNEGIE WAVE ENERGY LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $88.38 million

MD: Dr Michael Ottaviano

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.21

REVENUE: $1.72 million

Carnegie Wave Energy’s CETO technology converts ocean swell into zero-emission renewable power and desalinated freshwater. Ten years of research at test sites off the coast of Western Australia, along with over $100 million in local and foreign investment, has helped grow the company’s global profile.

A recent £2 million grant from the Scottish government boosted stock prices.

21 DYESOL LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MD: Richard Caldwell

MARKET VALUE: $110.13 million

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.12

REVENUE: $1.44 million

Dyesol Limited (ASX: DYE) is a renewable energy supplier and leader in Perovskite Solar Cell (PSC) technology – 3rd Generation photovoltaic technology. The company’s vision is to create a viable low-cost source of electricity with the potential to disrupt the global energy supply chain and energy balance.

MD of Dyesol, Richard Caldwell

22 EVOGENIX LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

SOLD FOR: $207 million

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.11

EvoGenix began as a startup in 2001 to commercialise EvoGene™, a powerful method of improving proteins, developed by the CSIRO and the CRC for Diagnostics. It acquired US company Absalus Inc in 2005, then merged with Australian biotechnology company Peptech in 2007, to form Arana Therapeutics. In 2009, Cephalon Inc bought the company for $207 million.

23 MURADEL PTY LTD

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO/MD: David Lewis

REVENUE: $4.18 million

With a vision to create sustainable energy through renewable biofuels, Muradel is a joint venture between the University of Adelaide, Murdoch University and SQC Pty Ltd. Their $10.7 million Demonstration Plant converts algae and biosolids into green crude oil. Muradel has plans for upgrades to enable the sustainable production of up to 125,000 L of crude oil, and to construct a commercial plant capable of supplying over 50 megalitres of biocrude from renewable feedstocks.

24 iCETANA

TYPE: NOT LISTED

CEO: Gary Pennefather

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.05

iCetana’s ‘iMotionFocus’ technology employs machine learning to determine what is the ‘normal’ activity viewed by each camera in a surveillance system and alerts operators when ‘abnormal’ events occur. This enables fewer operators to monitor more cameras with greater efficiency.

25 PHYLOGICA LTD

TYPE: LISTED

MARKET VALUE: $33.82 million

CEO: Dr Richard Hopkins

INNOVATION RATIO: 0.09

Phylogica is a drug discovery service, and the owner of Phylomer® Libraries, the largest and most structurally diverse suite of natural peptides. It has worked with some of the world’s largest drug companies, including Pfizer and Roche, to uncover drug candidates.

The Top 25 Science Meets Business R&D spin-off companies was written by Refraction Media in consultation with universities, industry and funding bodies, and supported by data from Thomson Reuters.

The research compiled by Refraction was judged by a panel comprising of: Dr Peter Riddles, biotechnology expert and director on many start-up enterprises; Dr Anna Lavelle, CEO and Executive Director of AusBiotech; and Tony Peacock, Chief Executive of the Cooperative Research Centres Association. The panel considered the following: total market value, annual turnover, patents awarded and cited, funding and investment, growth year-on-year, social value, overseas expansion and major partnerships.

Features, Industry, Innovation, News

Women in science and business

March 7, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Academia has a checkered history of elevating women in science. While many leading women scientists to-date have acted as truly innovative researchers – Marie Curie for example – much of the way science is celebrated has innate bias.

Scientists are ranked by academic achievement – promotions and grants, recognition and awards – all emphasising papers published and cited, fellowships received and so on.

Enabling women in science

Australia needs to clearly develop a new platform of scientific achievement – in which, according to the $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA), innovation is “critical to improving Australia’s competitiveness, standard of living, high wages and generous social welfare net”.

NISA notes several important factors, but fails to clearly set an agenda for women in science to succeed within the new innovation framework. For instance, it cites:

“We will introduce, for the first time, clear and transparent measures of non-academic impact and industry engagement when assessing university research performance.”

These factors are also critical in removing barriers to career advancement for women in science who have taken a career break, and whose academic output is less than men in equivalent positions as a result.

It also notes that women hold “around a quarter of STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] and ICT [information and communications technology] related jobs and are significantly underrepresented in high-level research positions. We need to engage more girls in STEM and computing, and provide pathways to progress their interest across the education system and into careers.”

To address this NISA has earmarked $13 million to improve opportunities for women in science and STEM more broadly. How this money will be spent is unclear.

There is a strong and clear need to alter the way that scientific achievements are acknowledged when looking at scientists’ track records, grants eligibility and promotional opportunities. We need to reward collaboration, to allow other career achievements along with citations and impact factor to be part of the recognition process.

We need to alter many things about the way scientists are recognised to promote women in science, from looking for bias in the language we use to valuing the mentorship provided by scientists in a more inclusive and meaningful way.

There needs to be flexibility, appropriate leave and allowances for travel factored into work in science. Education around bias is important, and much could be learned from the corporate sector here.

This is not the time to take baby steps in addressing gender equity for women in science. We need to take great strides, and look to the government for greater leadership in addressing this sooner rather than later.

– Heather Catchpole, Editor, KnowHow magazine

Science Meets Business women’s success stories

Science Meets Business profiles celebrate the women in science today.

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Innovation, News, Society

Science meets Parliament

March 3, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Featured image above: In his National Press Club address this week Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, says lessons can be learned from The Swedish Vasa warship. Photo courtesy of Dennis Jarvis as per the Creative Commons License, image resized.

Finkel’s speech was the National Press Club address for Science meets Parliament 2016. This two-day event brings together scientists looking for better ways to communicate their research to policy makers.

Over a series of workshops and activities, people from the media, policy advisers and parliamentarians share their insights on developing policy and how to engage key influencers.

With a host of esteemed speakers, the Science meets Parliament program covers topics such as ‘what journalists need to turn your science into news’ and ‘science and politics, how do they mix?’. This year it also addressed what the National Innovation and Science Agenda means for scientists across Australia.

The event’s organisers, Science and Technology Australia, say that Science meets Parliament aims to “build links between scientists, politicians and policymakers that open up avenues for information and idea exchanges into the future”.

It also hopes to “stimulate and inform Parliament’s discussion of scientific issues that underpin Australia’s economic, social and environmental wellbeing”.

At last year’s event, Professor Ian Chubb AC, former Chief Scientist, spoke about the pace of progress over the past 25 years and how science will be a cornerstone for future prosperity.

This year, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Alan Finkel AO, spoke about a nation in transition, learning from failure and encouraging intelligent innovation. Finkel believes this requires thinking and operating at scale, and collaborative research to manage the issues and interactions that surround bold, innovative technology.

Click here to read the full transcript of Finkel’s address published by The Conversation on 2 March 2016.

Click here to see some of the speeches presented at last year’s event, such as The Messy Nature of the Policymaking Process, Who is Inspiring Australia? and Getting your Science out of the Lab.

– Elise Roberts

Careers, Features, Industry

Connecting graduates with businesses

February 29, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Gaining industry experience and seeing how their research can have practical applications is important to early career researchers. Universities and industry are now working together to help provide graduates with the opportunity to work on commercial solutions for real-life problems.

Sally Bradford won the 2015 Showcasing Early Career Researchers competition, and is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Canberra. She developed an electronic mental health assessment app allowing physicians to diagnose and support their patients’ previously undisclosed issues. Bradford’s research is part of a larger collaborative project with the Young and Well CRC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdS9BzWEafE&feature=youtu.be

Perth-based cancer immunotherapy research group Selvax Pty Ltd has entered a commercial partnership with Curtin University. They signed a two-year contract to develop anti-cancer immunotherapy treatments in November 2015, after CEO Tony Fitzgerald saw value in Curtin Senior Research Fellow Dr Delia Nelson’s ten years of research into immunological agents.

“We want access to innovative research to make practical use of what researchers are discovering,” says Fitzgerald.

These industry partnerships aren’t new. “It’s a well-trodden path in the USA,” says Fitzgerald.

“But it’s not as common in Australia – we’re great at innovating, but not great at commercialising our work.”

Perth-based energy company Bombora Wave Power needed to know what sensors would work underwater with its unique wave energy converter (WEC), so they partnered with Edith Cowan University (ECU) through the university’s Industry and PhD Research Engagement Program, which matches Western Australian PhD candidates with industry. ECU graduate Gary Allwood researched ways of using optical fibre sensors to measure load and stress on the WEC system’s membrane.

“The partnership allowed me to do things that haven’t been done before, like use optical fibres as sensors instead of electrical sensors,” says Allwood, who will work with Bombora Wave Power to test the sensors.

There are other, similar Australian programs. CRCs offer a number of scholarships across 14 different fields of research, giving PhD students a chance to gain industry experience.

Monash University started its Graduate Research Interdisciplinary Programs (GRIPs) in early 2015, allowing PhD students to solve real-world problems through collaborative research.

The Chemicals and Plastics GRIP has 20 industry partners offering training and funding, including Dulux and 3M. One student is treating coffee grounds to create a fertiliser to improve the soil quality of agricultural land.

“This is an exciting and innovative model for postgraduate education that encourages interdisciplinary and industry-engaged practice,” says Monash University’s Vice-Provost for Graduate Education, Professor Zlatko Skrbis.

– Marisa Wikramanayake

Innovation, Opinion, Society

Firing up our start-ups

February 24, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Stories of ‘unicorn’ Initial Public Offerings and billionaires in their 30s are great. But it’s the creation of quality jobs that truly makes innovation a national priority.

A recent report from the Office of the Chief Economist showed Australia added about one million jobs from 2006–11. Start-up companies added 1.4 million jobs, whereas older companies shed 400,000 jobs over the same period. But it’s not any start-up that matters; only 3.2% of start-ups take off in a dramatic fashion, providing nearly 80% of those new jobs. While Australia has a relatively high rate of companies starting up, the key seems to be getting more of them into high-growth mode.

When Israel faced a massive influx of immigrants after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, it turned to innovation as a means of providing jobs. Given the country’s lack of natural resources, they didn’t have a choice. A population of four million people taking in one million more meant Israel had to become an innovative economy.

They grew their investment in research and development dramatically – to the point where Israel is now one of only two countries consistently spending more than 4% of GDP on R&D.

Israel has translated that spending into high-tech export success. Now, multinational technology company Intel employs over 10,000 Israelis. The Israeli Government is hands-on in its approach to de-risking early stage companies. But this is not achieved through government spending alone. In fact, the Israeli Government’s share of total R&D spending is just one-third of that of Australia, and its higher education sector is just one half. Business carries the lion’s share of R&D spending in Israel, making up 80% of the total, compared with 60% in Australia.

If we want jobs, we need innovation. We are in a unique period when there seems to be complete political agreement on this point. If we want innovation, we should take lessons from wherever we can learn them to develop the Australian system. A lesson from Israel is to use government spending more effectively at the early stages of company development to shift more start-ups into high-growth mode. If we could double the current 3.2% of today’s start-ups that become high-growth companies, we could provide more rewarding jobs for Australia’s future.

Israel concentrates almost 100% of its government innovation support for business on small and medium-sized enterprises. The comparable figure for Australia is 50% – a big hint for what we could do differently to fire up our start-up sector.

–Tony Peacock

Tony Peacock is CEO of the Cooperative Research Centres Association and founder of KnowHow.

Health, News, Technology

Smart Contact Lens

February 22, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The University of Adelaide in South Australia worked closely with RMIT University to develop small hi-tech lenses to filter harmful optical radiation without distorting vision.

Dr Withawat Withayachumnankul from the University of Adelaide helped conceive the idea and says the potential applications of the technology included creating new high-performance devices that connect to the internet.

“With advanced techniques to control the properties of surfaces, we can dynamically control their filter properties, which allow us to potentially create devices for high data rate optical communication or smart contact lenses,” he says.

“There is also the potential for it to have Wi-Fi access points and connection to external devices.”

The small lenses could also be used to gather and transmit information on a small display.

While there are numerous possible applications of the device, Withayachumnankul says the original purpose of the lens was an alternative to radiation protective goggles.

“We used a stretchable material called PDMS (Polydimethylsiloxane) and put some nano-material structures inside that layer which interacts with light,” he says.

“The functionality of the device is that the lens filters the light while maintaining a fully transparent structure, and can protect the eyes from radiation.”

Tiny artificial crystals termed “dielectric resonators” were used to help manipulate the waves of light.

The resonators are a fraction of the wavelength of light (100–500 nanometres) and are 500 times thinner than human hair.

“The current challenge is that the dielectric resonators only work for specific colours, but with our flexible surface we can adjust the operation range simply by stretching it,” Withayachumnankul says.

The materials used to make the lens have proven to be biocompatible and do not create any irritation to the eyes, making the device safe to wear.

Findings of the research were published in leading nano-science journal ACS Nano and were undertaken at RMIT’s Micro Nano Research Facility.

The discovery comes after scientists from the University of South Australia’s Future Industries Institute this month successfully completed “proof of concept” research on a polymer film coating that conducts electricity on a contact lens, with the potential to build miniature electrical circuits that are safe to be worn by a person.

– Caleb Radford

This article was first published by The Lead on 19 February 2016. Read the original article here.

Innovation, Profiles, Technology

Text mining gold

February 16, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Karin Verspoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and Deputy Director of the University of Melbourne Health and Bioinformatics Centre, describes her early fascination with computers and exposure to multiple languages as key drivers for her becoming a computational linguist.

“When I was nine years old my parents bought me a programmable games console, and I discovered that I really enjoyed getting computers to do things from my imagination – it appealed to my logic and creativity.”

Karin went on to study BASIC – a high-level computer programming language developed for non-scientists that was popularised in the 1980s when the home computer market exploded.

Born in Senegal on the west coast of Africa to Dutch parents, Karin’s formative experience with the games console drove her study for an undergraduate degree with double major in Computer Science and Cognitive Sciences at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “I was drawn to the question of how to get computers to think and understand language,” Karin says.

“It was the perfect course because it combined computing, psychology, philosophy and linguistics.”

On completing her undergraduate studies, Karin swapped the heat of Texas for the cooler climate of Scotland, where she undertook a Master’s degree and PhD in Cognitive Science and Natural Languages at the University of Edinburgh. After finishing the PhD and doing a short stint as a research fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney working on the Dynamic Document Delivery project, which looked at generating natural language texts on demand, Karin left academe for a very different world: the business of start-ups.

“It was arguably the most exciting period of my career – I was involved in two start-ups with amazing ideas,” Karin says. “One of them was trying to build a thinking machine that was going to predict the stock market. It was crazy and so much fun, but it died after the dotcom bubble crash.”

Although the second start-up was much more successful, Karin missed the world of research and so took up a position at the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where she was able to leverage her business experience and pursue applied research in computational methods for the extraction and retrieval of knowledge from databases and information systems.

“Los Alamos was the home of the human genome project, and it was there I got into computational biology,” explains Karin, “I started working on text mining in the published molecular literature, which eventually led me to the University of Colorado and an opportunity to work exclusively in biomedical text mining.”

Text mining is the analysis of a natural language text – like English or French – by a computer. It’s used to discover and extract new information by linking together data from different written sources to generate new facts or hypotheses.

Karin’s current work at the University of Melbourne involves applying text mining to the field of biomedical research. “The rate of scientific publications is dramatically increasing in the biomedical space,” explains Karin, “The most important biomedical research repository called PubMed, hosted by the United States National Library of Medicine, has indexed over 25 million research publications.”

The multi-disciplinary nature of current biomedical research combined with the huge amounts of published material means that scientists today must stay abreast of a much broader range of literature to stay up-to-date.

“We’re looking to develop an automated computer system that analyses words to discover the relationships between them – to provide researchers with a tool that allows them to ask more structured questions and receive more targeted information,” Karin says.

– Carl Williams

Agriculture, News, Technology

Farm tech saves harvest

February 12, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The state produced 7.2 million tonnes of grain in 2015–16, slightly down on the 7.6 million tonnes harvested in 2014–15. Although it was the seventh consecutive year the state was above its 10-year average, the result was well below the five-year average of 8.2 million tonnes.

Wheat again led the way with 4.3 million tonnes while barley contributed 1.9 million tonnes.

Grain Producers SA CEO Darren Arney says it was a rollercoaster season courtesy of a slow start followed by a cold, wet winter and a very hot, dry spring.

“In the end it was quite incredible that we actually had the harvest that we did,” he says.

“The crops had the potential to yield another 15–20% if we’d had a normal spring so it could have been 8–9 million tonnes of grain.”

Arney says a fall in world grain prices generally had been offset by a falling Australian dollar.

He says varietal advances resulting in better strains of wheat and barley, more efficient matching of fertilisers and the strategic use of herbicides were among advances helping to achieve productivity gains.

“A similar rainfall year was probably 2007 where we produced 5.5–6 million tonnes so we’ve picked up 20–25% because of advancements in research and development and advancements in cropping systems,” says Arney.

The Upper South East and Western Eyre Peninsula regions recorded below average harvests while the Eastern Eyre Peninsula and Mid North regions experienced relatively good seasons, helping them to produce about a million tonnes each.

Extreme weather conditions in late November resulted in a fire in the Pinery area, which spread rapidly and burnt approximately 85,000 ha.

About 22,500 ha of unharvested crops were burnt with estimated crop losses of 60,000 tonnes of grain, 33,000 tonnes of hay and 50,000 tonnes of straw. The fire also destroyed 18,000 sheep and 87 cattle.

Agriculture Minister Leon Bignell says the farm gate value of the crop was estimated at $1.8 billion and the export value was estimated at $2.2 billion.

“Despite the challenging season, South Australia’s grain sector continues to be a powerhouse industry generating more than $4.6 billion in revenue in 2014–15, with approximately 85% exported around the world,” he says.

Primary Industries and Resources South Australia Grains Industry Account Manager Dave Lewis says overall the yields were highly variable.

“Wheat crops were generally more affected by the hot, dry finish with significant tonnages downgraded,” he says.

The future of grain research in South Australia has been secured through a joint $50 million investment by the State Government and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC).

Bignell says the five year deal included $25 million from GRDC and $25 million in-kind support from the State Government’s South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI).

“SARDI is the nation’s leading research provider in farming systems for low to medium rainfall areas, crop protection and improvement as well as projects such as the National Oat Breeding Program,” he says.

“SARDI will commit staff, equipment and resources to the value of $25 million and the GRDC will match the State Government’s investment with a cash investment.”

In other South Australian agriculture news, the State Government has welcomed the Federal Government’s decision to relocate offices of the GRDC and Fisheries Research and Development Corporation to Adelaide.

The latest results from the State Government’s soil improvement project have confirmed sandy soils can be greatly improved, resulting in increased grain yields.

Bignell says the New Horizons Project had shown vastly improved crop production at three trial sites through managing the top 50 cm of soil, rather than the traditional top 10 cm.

– Andrew Spence

This article was first published by The Lead on 10 February 2016. Read the original article here.

Highlight, Innovation, News, Opinion, World

The startup nation

January 21, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Above: The Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology. David Shankbone

As the Australian Government releases its much anticipated Innovation Statement, what lessons can we draw from Israel, the startup nation, for implementation of the statement’s plans for education?

I recently travelled to Israel as part of an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce trade delegation which aimed to explore business and investment opportunities and to better understand Israel’s unique entrepreneurial culture and innovation ecosystem. The delegation was headed by Wyatt Roy, MP, Assistant Minister for Innovation and a key player in the development of the Innovation Statement.

The trip was a revelation, as I witnessed in a very real and tangible way that a national groundswell towards a knowledge-based economy is possible.

As Avi Hasson, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Economy explained, Israel has accelerated from “oranges, as the largest export 20 years ago, to technology now being a $US50 billion GDP contributor”.

After an inspiring eight days studying the mechanisms of one of the world’s great start-up communities – and particularly the key role that universities play in technology transfer – I believe it is vital that Australian universities capitalise on the new focus on innovation and collaboration if we are to create our own startup nation.

‘Collaboration [is] a breath of fresh air between industry and Israel’s universities’

I saw in Israel that a culture formed from 2000 years of overcoming adversity underpins innovation and entrepreneurship there. The startup community’s innovative spirit is also formed in the crucible of military conscription, where lives are at risk and everyone is personally involved and affected.

It is something of the national character that Israelis are alert to possibilities that can make a difference, and willing to take action, quickly!

This culture is not a template Australia can replicate. However, the delegation’s visit to a number of different educational institutions allows an Australian take on the Israeli strategy.

As delegation member Jonathan Marshall, founder of Bondi Labs, put it, we were witness to “mutual collaboration – a breath of fresh air between industry and Israel’s universities”.

In Israel, everyone knows everyone, and this promotes positive channels between governments, academia and industry. For universities, the key is to find researchers who are early adopters of industry collaboration, and to experiment with small initiatives.

Demonstrating small wins in a risk-averse environment like Australia will assist in propagating advocates, and will generate incentives to commercialise technology developed by our institutions.

Israel has led the world in technology transfer from universities – spinning out new enterprises. Two in particular, Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have interesting models.

Technion, a science and technology research university based in Haifa, north of Tel Aviv, has a strong mechanism to engage entrepreneurs: every student enrolled has to take a mandatory Minor in Entrepreneurship.

This particularly resonated with Adrian Turner, CEO of Data61, CSIRO’s commercialisation vehicle. He says it reminded him of the 18 years he spent in the US’s startup nation Silicon Valley. “The system seems to be very focused on encouraging students to pursue the entrepreneurial path,” he says. The result? Technion transfers into the economy 100 student-led businesses a year, with revenues that exceed $US32 million.

‘The system seems to be very focused on encouraging students to pursue the entrepreneurial path’

Building a startup nation

At the other tech transfer leader, Hebrew University, researchers are strongly encouraged to engage with industry.

Liaising with professionals with real-life challenges and opportunities influences academic research outcomes, in turn solving unmet market needs. Products based on the university’s tech transfer developments generate more than $US2 billion in annual sales.

Both business models are successful. As Sarah Pearson, CEO and Founder of Canberra-based CBR Innovation Network explains, “Science and innovation education permeate the culture of Israel, beginning by engaging three-year-olds in science. Parents value entrepreneurship as a career, universities foster a culture of impact and commercial outcomes, and the government supports this in a strategic and holistic way.”

A lot has been said about the need for Australian schools to provide more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. In Israel, Jon Medved, CEO ofOurCrowd, the world’s biggest equity crowd funding platform, told us Israel is “running out of geeks”.

So, visiting the science and technology education centre Technoda was humbling. Technoda attracts more than 30,000 children a year to science enrichment classes, from every ethnic group, religion and lifestyle.

With the recent opening of a second campus, just 10 kilometres north of Gaza, it is clear STEM education can and must be accessible to everyone.

From a university perspective, Australia needs to worry about the brain drain as well. Some 8000 IT students graduate from Australian universities and return to homes overseas each year.

Until the throughput of social ventures such as Code Club Australia start to drive new, local STEM talent into the Australian workforce, we must do much more to encourage this demographic of international graduates to stay and help build our tech startup community.

Universities have a major part to play in guiding future talent into an innovative environment where government, industry and academia collaborate.

We can promote this now with students playing a central role. Students must be able to access entrepreneurial education programs and easier ways to commercialise university technologies.

Israel is leading the way. It’s time for Australia to take the next step. – Stephen Rutter

Stephen Rutter is Manager of UTS Business School’s Business Practice Unit. Among other things the unit facilitates engagement between faculty, industry and the entrepreneurial community. He was previously an Executive in Residence at Flinders University, where he was involved in starting up its New Venture Institute.

See the federal government’s Innovation Statement here, and the Innovation Inquiry Report here, including the Expert Report by the Dean of UTS Business School, Professor Roy Green.

UTS Vice-Chancellor Attila Brungs talks about university and industry working together here.

Environment, Health

Love Hertz

January 7, 2016 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

James Cook University researchers have found sex sells when it comes to luring male mosquitoes.

Senior Research Officer Brian Johnson and Professor Scott Ritchie set out to make a cheap and effective audio lure for scientists collecting male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes – the species that carries dengue and yellow fever.

They found a tone of precisely 484 Hertz, the frequency of a female Aedes aegypti’s wings, brought 95% of male mosquitoes to the trap.

Johnson says the device cost around $20 and could be run by itself for weeks. “We started with a cheap mobile phone and moved to an even cheaper MP3 player. There are no harmonics, it’s a pure tone and very simple to produce.”

The effectiveness of the audio lure is easy to see: when it’s switched on, mosquitoes flock to the device, and fly away as soon as it’s turned off, as can be seen in the video.

The invention of the audio trap is timely: male mosquitoes do not bite, but new anti-mosquito strategies involve capturing and sterilising them before releasing them to breed unsuccessfully with females.

“There are a number of projects underway,” says Johnson. “They required capturing and releasing tens of thousands of male mosquitoes, but most traps are aimed at capturing females.”

He says there was no chance of eliminating mosquito populations by trapping males alone, as only a few needed to survive to continue the breeding cycle.

The scientists also found that female mosquitoes were completely oblivious to the sound of male wing beats. “There’s no real need for females to respond to male overtures,” says Johnson.

The team is now optimising the trap for field use and coordinating with trap manufacturers to add the feature to their products.

This article was first published by James Cook University on 6 January 2016. Read the original article here.

Health, Highlight, News

Computer vision saves lives

December 16, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

It is one of the last areas of pathology testing to be automated: diagnosing which strain of bacteria is contained in potentially infected samples such as urine, sputum, wound swabs and fecal samples.

And doing it faster could save lives, allowing more rapid diagnosis of infections and early choice of the right line of treatment.

South Australian company LBT Innovations Ltd has worked with the University of Adelaide to develop an automated tool for diagnosing infections. Known as APAS – Automated Plate Assessment System – the technology incorporates computer vision to hasten the time required to detect infections in samples from patients.

“APAS accurately captures, reads and interprets bacterial cultures significantly faster than a trained scientist,” says LBT Innovations CEO Lusia Guthrie.

“Once incorporated into pathology services, we anticipate this technology will create significant cost reductions and save lives.”

After conducting clinical trials of APAS with more than 10,000 patient samples in Australia and USA, LBT Innovations is submitting the technology to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval as a diagnostic tool.

Improving old technology

Although over 130 years old, the use of gel plates to grow and identify bacteria still sits at the heart of modern diagnostic services.

For example, if you have a suspected urinary tract infection, a small sample of your urine will be smeared over a plate of solid gel. After incubation, a scientist examines the plate to classify any bacteria that have grown. Appropriate drug treatment can then be selected. The whole process takes 3–4 days, sometimes up to an entire week.

“Although around 70% of cultured plates are actually negative for bacteria, it typically takes a whole shift of human workers to sort through which ones need further analysis,” Guthrie says.

“APAS will significantly reduce this sample processing time.”

Cutting time from the analytical process will have an impact through reducing labour costs, allowing patients shorter lengths of stay in hospitals and freeing up microbiologists to focus on positive samples that require immediate specialist attention.

“We’re currently conducting market research to calculate the impact of this in dollar terms,” says Guthrie.

Industry and university collaboration

LBT Innovations worked with University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Visual Technologies (ACVT) to develop the plate reading capability in APAS.

“APAS consists of an image capture system linked to a computer loaded with algorithms that allow the plates to be categorised based on their appearance,” explains Professor Anton Van Den Hengel, Director at ACVT.

“One of the keys to successfully developing this technology has been to embed our engineer Rhys Hill within the LBT Innovations offices for the duration of the project.”

“With clear communication and a strong working relationship, it’s been a collaborative process of technology development,” says Van Den Hengel.

The intellectual property associated with APAS is fully owned by LBT Innovations.

Market for better, faster diagnostics

The latest clinical tests show that APAS algorithms are working for diagnosis of urinary cultures, with over 98% accuracy in detecting bacterial growth on plates.

Urinary tract infections are estimated to affect 150 million people each year globally, and the societal costs – including health care and time missed from work – are approximately US$3.5 billion per year in the USA alone.

Other samples that require plate culture and analysis for diagnosis include stool (bowel infections), sputum (respiratory tract infections), wound swabs (skin and tissue infections) and blood (septicaemia).

LBT Innovations plans to expand APAS testing for approval in all these fields. The company estimates there are 27,000 laboratories globally that can immediately benefit from APAS. The largest of these facilities process about 4000 plate samples every day.

“Laboratories are under pressure to process more samples and to do it faster, despite limits on budgets and human resources,” explains Guthrie.

“Once it’s approved, we plan to launch APAS in Australia and then roll it out into the USA, Canada, UK and Europe.”

LBT Innovations created a joint venture with German engineering company Hettich AG to fully develop commercial products that incorporate APAS technology with sophisticated plate-handling robotics.

– Sarah Keenihan

Health, Profiles

Bioinformatician on the move

December 15, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

In 2001, the Human Genome Project, an international research project whose goal was to determine the sequence of genes that make up a human being, successfully mapped the human genome – the set of genetic instructions, like a recipe book, that contains all the information needed to assemble and form a person.

Thousands of individual human genomes have now been mapped, generating a vast amount of information on the structure and function of genes and revealing a highly complex and intricate genetic landscape that has led to new insights in biology, human evolution and the diagnosis of genetic disorders, such as Huntington’s disease and cystic fibrosis.

Harriet Dashnow, a PhD student in the Bioinformatics Group at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne, is one of the intrepid explorers navigating this terrain. Her research is seeking to understand how variations in the location and pattern of specific genes can lead to genetic disorders.

“One of the problems is that we’re very good at understanding simple mutations inside genes,” explains Dashnow, “but it’s clear that there are lots of different kinds of variation we don’t understand, and we have a lot of trouble testing for. So the focus of my PhD is to look at a particular type of variation called a microsatellite or a short tandem repeat.”

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – the molecule that contains most of the genetic instructions for all living organisms – comprising 2–5 base pairs, which repeat throughout a human genome. Base pairs, linked nitrogen-containing biological compounds represented by A-T and C-G, are the building blocks of DNA.

Short tandem repeats can appear at thousands of different locations throughout the human genome, and are noteworthy for their high diversity within the population as well as their high mutation rates.

A repeated sequence, for example ATATATAT, will have a different number of copies of AT from one person to the next: “This is a kind of variation that we’re not good at measuring,” explains Dashnow, “so my work is trying to measure this variation so we can look for it in a clinical setting and figure out when it’s causing a disease.

“Genetic disorders such as ataxia [a dysfunction of the nervous system that affects movement] are often caused by these kinds of repetitive mutations, but it’s actually quite difficult to test for these using genome sequencing.”

Enter the interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics, which employs the power of computer science, statistics and engineering to analyse and interpret biological data in order to tackle some of the most challenging questions facing biology today.

“When I was undertaking the biochemistry and genetics part of my undergraduate degree I was starting to hear how computational methods were being used to solve biological questions,” says Dashnow. “It became increasingly clear to me that was the direction biology was going in. So it was going to be important for people to have these computational skills.”

Dashnow, who clearly thrives on challenges, undertook a double degree in science and arts – with majors in biochemistry, genetics and psychology – at the University of Melbourne. And she believes this has proved to be highly beneficial: “It has given me the ability and confidence to write, which has been incredibly valuable, and it’s something that people who just study science don’t always get an opportunity to explore.”

Although she enjoyed the experience of studying literature and psychology as part of her arts degree, Dashnow is a scientist at heart. “I’ve always wanted to be a scientist ever since I was very little. In primary school I thought I wanted to be a physicist, but when I started to take science classes in high school I became really fascinated by biology and genetics, and how genes make us who we are,” she says, recalling the moment when her path in science became apparent to her.

After graduating, Dashnow took up a position as a bioinformatician at the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI), working on the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance project, whose aim is to integrate genomics – the study of the structure and function of genes – into everyday healthcare.

“It will become more and more common to sequence people’s genomes when they get sick,” says Dashnow. “So understanding and interpreting information provided by genome sequencing will allow us to diagnose more diseases and come up with appropriate treatments.”

Dashnow did a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Melbourne then worked at VLSCI for over a year before starting a PhD. The research she is now undertaking for her PhD follows on from her Master’s work, and has already been recognised through the awarding of a highly competitive MCRI PhD top-up scholarship.

Dashnow is currently visiting the Broad Institute, a world-class genomics and biological research centre that emerged from initiatives at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she will undertake collaborative research on muscle disorders, furthering her knowledge and understanding in the field.

– Carl Williams

Features, Innovation, News, Society, Technology

Innovation and Science on Turnbull agenda

December 7, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently announced the creation of a National Innovation and Science Agenda which includes funding, tax incentives and a strong focus on education initiatives to up the ante for Australia in terms of its innovation output.

The policy comes off the back of increased push since the Prime Minister gained office on the need to position Australia more strongly in the global economy and to facilitate a rapid move from traditional income from resources and manufacturing to one based on ‘ideas and entrepreneurship’.

Early announcements include:

$8 million in a network of incubators helping start-ups get the resources, knowledge and networks they need to take their ideas to the world
New arrangements to encourage collaboration between researchers and industry, including streamlining and refocussing a greater proportion of research block grant funding toward collaboration, with an addition $127 million in funding
Over 10 years: $520 million for the Australian Synchrotron, $294 million for the Square Kilometre Array, and $1.5 billion for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS)
A $36 million Global Innovation Strategy to support businesses and researchers to collaborate with their global counterparts on research with landing pads established for Australian entrepreneurs and startups in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley and three other key locations
$99 million investment in programmes to boost digital literacy and skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) amongst young Australians
$13 million to increasing opportunities for women in research, STEM industries, startups and entrepreneurial firms

The Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Christopher Pyne, said: “The release of the Agenda is just the beginning. The next step will be a national discussion around this new way of thinking and doing, and the importance of innovation and science to our future.

“We will highlight the successes to date and inspire all Australians to be involved in shaping our future and harnessing the potential of our ideas,” Mr Pyne said.

Growth factor

November 23, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The Jack Hills are part of an ancient landscape of scorched red earth in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. But it wasn’t until 2001, when a rock from the hills was brought 800 km south to Curtin University’s John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research (JDLC), that scientists discovered just how ancient this landscape really is. The Curtin scientists dated zircon crystals in the sample at 4.4 billion years, making it the oldest known Earth rock.

This groundbreaking research required a sophisticated measurement of trace elements in the crystal, and there are very few facilities in the world where this could have taken place. Zircon traps uranium in its crystal structure when it is formed. In principle, the radioactive decay of uranium into lead is like a ticking clock. If you can accurately measure how much lead has been created and how much uranium remains in a particular sample, you can work out when the crystal was formed. To do this, and to arrive at an age with an uncertainty of just 0.2%, Curtin researchers called upon the $4 million Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro Probe (SHRIMP), the flagship technology of the JDLC. There are fewer than 20 SHRIMPs in the world, and Curtin is home to two of them.

“Zircon is like diamond – it’s forever,” explains JDLC Director, Professor Brent McInnes. Being a very hard and chemically inert material, zircon lasts for billions of years. The JDLC has world-renowned expertise in dating rocks by analysing the uranium-lead decay process in zircon.

The JDLC is also regularly put to more practical uses, such as aiding resource exploration in Western Australia. The SHRIMPs are the centrepieces of a suite of equipment worth $25 million, including scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, ion beam milling instruments, laser probes and mass spectrometers.

“We are an open access lab,” explains McInnes. “These instruments can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The JDLC collaborates with research groups around the world and also assists the Geological Survey of Western Australia to make maps used to attract investment in mining and petroleum exploration. Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences researchers use the instruments to do similar work in China, controlling the Perth-based SHRIMPs remotely from Beijing.

The JDLC facilities have also been used to solve practical problems for industry partners. When exploration company Independence Group NL found tin in a gravel bed at the base of a WA river, they turned to the JDLC to help identify the origins of the ore. Was it from a local source or had it been transported from elsewhere and deposited in the riverbed? Using SHRIMP, the JDLC team measured the quantities of trace uranium and lead elements in the tin ore cassiterite and calculated its age. When they performed similar measurements on zircon from local granite, they found its age was the same. This showed the tin was local, and helped the Independence Group pinpoint the precise locations to drill exploratory holes. “We have an incredible set of research tools that can be deployed to help industry reduce the risks and costs of exploration,” says McInnes.

“Recognising the gap, Curtin has set up a dedicated funding program, called Kickstart, to help translate lab research into commercial ventures.”

Collaborating with industry is a commonplace activity for John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor – Faculty of Science and Engineering, Moses Tadé. Industry possesses considerable experts, he says, yet still tends to approach academics when looking at something more fundamental. Tadé’s group brings a range of skills to the table, including expertise in multi-scale modelling, computational flow dynamics, reaction engineering and optimisation modelling. Collaboration is highly beneficial for both sides, he says.

Ongoing projects include the development of solid oxide fuel cells with a Melbourne-based fuel cell company, and a project in partnership with a petroleum industry multinational to remove mercury from oil and gas. In recent years, sponsorship from leading minerals and exploration companies Chevron Australia and Woodside Energy has supported the growth of the Curtin Corrosion Engineering Industry Centre, of which Tadé is Director. The Centre looks to develop practical solutions to the problem of corrosion in gas pipelines, which can lead to costly leaks and dangerous explosions.

In another project, led by chemical engineer Professor Vishnu Pareek, Curtin has teamed up with Woodside to develop a more efficient way to regasify liquefied natural gas. Currently, natural gas from Australia is liquified so it can be transported efficiently by ship to overseas markets, particularly China. But once it gets there, the regasification process can burn up to 2% of the product. A new process being developed at Curtin uses the energy in the ambient air to aid regasification – a more efficient solution that will both increase profits and reduce CO₂ emissions. “It’s very exciting,” says Tadé. “A big thing for the environment.”

Curtin has become a busy hub of innovation, with a spate of spin-off companies being created to translate the research. “We have a focused effort on commercialisation and research outcomes,” explains Rohan McDougall, Director of IP Commercialisation at Curtin.

Public funding of science and engineering research can often only take new technology to a certain level of development such as ‘proof-of-concept’. Securing funds from investors to turn pre-commercial work into a real-world product is tough as investors are wary at this early high-risk stage. “The gap is traditionally known as the ‘valley of death’,” says McDougall. Recognising this gap, Curtin has set up a dedicated funding program, called Kickstart, to help translate lab research into commercial ventures.

The John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, led by Professor Brent McInnes (left) – which has a team of scientists, including Associate Professor Noreen Evans (right), and a $25 million suite of equipment – assists resource exploration in Western Australia.

The John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, led by Professor Brent McInnes (above top) – which has a team of scientists, including Associate Professor Noreen Evans (above bottom), and a $25 million suite of equipment – assists resource exploration in Western Australia.

As well as the extra funding, commercialisation is aided at Curtin by strong links with the venture capital community and industry, which advise on commercialisation routes and intellectual property. The university also encourages an innovation environment by running contests in which staff and students describe technologies they are working on and that may have commercial applications.

This commercialisation focus has reaped dividends in terms of successful spin-off companies. In the medical space, Neuromonics sells a device for the treatment of the auditory condition tinnitus. In digital technology, iCetana has developed a video analytics technology for security applications. Skrydata, a data analytics company, provides a service for extracting patterns from big data. Sensear has developed sophisticated hearing equipment technology for high-noise environments such as oil and gas facilities.

One of the biggest recent success stories has been Scanalyse, which in 2013 won the prestigious Australian Museum Rio Tinto Eureka Prize for Commercialisation of Innovation. Scanalyse grew out of a collaboration between Curtin and Alcoa, one of the world’s largest aluminium producers. Alcoa called on Curtin’s experts to find a way to analyse the grinders used in their mills. Every time a grinder wore out, it was costing ~$100,000/hour in downtime. It was crucial to monitor the condition of these machines, but this required someone to climb inside and take measurements. Through their 2005 collaboration with Alcoa, spatial scientists at Curtin developed a laser scanning system capable of measuring 10 million points in just 30 minutes.

“At the same time, they developed a software tool that could be applied more generally,” explains McDougall. “So the business was established to look at the application of that technology to mills and other mine site equipment.”

Scanalyse has since found customers in more than 20 countries and is making an impact worldwide. In 2013, it was bought by Finnish engineering giant Outotec.

– Cathal O’Connell

Careers, Highlight, News

Annual honorific awards

November 23, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Scientists who are leading the world on solar energy efficiency, helping to develop one-shot flu vaccines, and making portable biosensors to detect viruses are among the winners of the Australian Academy of Science’s annual honorific awards.

Each year the Academy presents awards to recognise scientific excellence, to researchers in the early stage of their careers through to those who have made life-long achievements.

This year’s announcement includes 17 award winners across astronomy, nanoscience, mathematics, chemistry, physics, environmental science and human health.

Professor Martin Green, sometimes known as the “father of photovoltaics”, has won the prestigious Ian Wark Medal and Lecture for his world-record breaking work improving solar efficiency.

Professor Martin Green

Dr Jane Elith and Associate Professor Cyrille Boyer, who recently won awards in the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science, will be the recipients of this year’s Fenner and Le Févre prizes.

Dr Jane Elith

Associate Professor Cyrille Boyer

The Academy President, Professor Andrew Holmes congratulated all the award winners for their work.

“These scientists are simply inspirational. They are working at the leading edges of their fields and of human knowledge, and they are developing innovations that will change and improve our society, our economy and our health,” says Holmes.

“This list of winners represents the best of Australia’s leading and emerging scientists; from researchers doing fundamental research to those building next generation technologies,” says Holmes.

The awards will be formally presented at the Academy’s annual three day celebration of Australian science, Science at the Shine Dome, in Canberra in May 2016.

Read more about the awardees and their research here.

This article was shared in a media release by the Australian Academy of Science on 23 November 2015. Featured image above: Aerial Shine Dome May 2015 credit Adi Chopra.

Features, Technology

Small scale, big consequences

November 4, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The nanoscale is so tiny it’s almost beyond comprehension. Too small for detection by the human eye, and not even discernible by most laboratory microscopes, it refers to measurements in the range of 1–100 billionths of a metre. The nanoscale is the level at which atoms and molecules come together to form structured materials.

The Nanochemistry Research Institute — NRI — conducts fundamental and applied research to understand, model and tailor materials at the nanoscale. It brings together scientists – with expertise in chemistry, engineering, computer simulations, materials and polymers – and external collaborators to generate practical applications in health, energy, environmental management, industry and exploration. These include new tests for cancer, and safer approaches to oil and gas transportation. Research ranges from government-funded exploratory science to confidential industry projects.

The NRI hosts research groups with specialist expertise in the chemical formation of minerals and other materials. “To understand minerals, it’s often important to know what is going on at the level of atoms,” explains Julian Gale, John Curtin Distinguished Professor in Computational Chemistry and former Acting Director of the NRI. “To do this, we use virtual observation – watching how atoms interact at the nanoscale – and modelling, where we simulate the behaviour of atoms on a computer.”

The mineral calcium carbonate is produced through biomineralisation by some marine invertebrates. “If we understand the chemistry that leads to the formation of carbonates in the environment, then we can look at how factors such as ocean temperature and pH can lead to the loss of minerals that are a vital component of coral reefs,” says Gale.

This approach could be used to build an understanding of how minerals are produced biologically, potentially leading to medical and technological benefits, including applications in bone growth and healing, or even kidney stone prevention and treatment.

Gale anticipates that a better understanding of mineral geochemistry may also shed light on how and where metals are distributed. “If you understand the chemistry of gold in solution and how deposits form, you might have a better idea where to look for the next gold mine,” he explains.

There are also environmental implications. “Formation of carbonate minerals, especially magnesium carbonate and its hydrates, has been proposed as a means of trapping atmospheric carbon in a stable solid state through a process known as geosequestration. We work with colleagues in the USA to understand how such carbonates form,” says Gale.

Minerals science is also relevant in industrial settings. Calcium carbonate scaling reduces flow rates in pipes and other structures in contact with water. “As an example, the membranes used for reverse osmosis in water desalination – a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane to remove salt and other minerals from saline water – can trigger the formation of calcium carbonate,” explains Gale. “This results in partial blockage of water flow through the membrane, and reduced efficiency of the desalination process.”

A long-term aim of research in this area is to design water membranes that prevent these blockages. There are also potential applications in the oil industry, where barium sulphate (barite) build-up reduces the flow in pipes, and traps dangerous radioactive elements such as radium.

Another problem for exploration companies is the formation of hydrates of methane and other low molecular weight hydrocarbon molecules. These can block pipelines and processing equipment during oil and gas transportation and operations, which results in serious safety and flow assurance issues. Materials chemist Associate Professor Xia Lou leads a large research group in the Department of Chemical Engineering that is developing low-dose gas hydrates inhibitors to prevent hydrate formation. “We also develop nanomaterials for the removal of organic contaminants in water, and nanosensors to detect or extract heavy metals,” she says.

“To understand minerals, it’s often important to know what is going on at the level of the atom.”

The capacity to control how molecules come together and then disassociate offers tantalising opportunities for product development, particularly in food science, drug delivery and cosmetics. In the Department of Chemistry, Professor Mark Ogden conducts nanoscale research looking at hydrogels, or networks of polymeric materials suspended in water.

“We study the 3D structure of hydrogels using the Institute’s scanning probe microscope,” says Ogden. “The technique involves running a sharp tip over the surface of the material. It provides an image of the topography of the surface, but we can also measure how hard, soft or sticky the surface is.” Ogden is developing methods for watching hydrogels grow and fall apart through heating and cooling. “We have the capability to do that sort of imaging now, and this in situ approach is quite rare around the world,” he says.

Ogden also conducts chemical research with a group of metals known as lanthanoids, which are rare-earth elements. His recent work, in collaboration with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), discovered unique elongated nanoscale structures.

“We’ve identified lanthanoid clusters that can emit UV light and have magnetic properties,” explains Ogden. “Some of these can form single molecule magnets. A key outcome will be to link cluster size and shape to these functional properties.” This may facilitate guided production of magnetic and light-emitting materials for use in sensing and imaging technologies.

“If you understand the chemistry of gold … then you might have a better idea of where to start looking for the next gold mine.”

The NRI is working across several areas of chemistry and engineering to develop nanoscale tools for detecting and treating health conditions. Professor Damien Arrigan applies a nanoscale electrochemical approach to detecting biological molecules, also known as biosensing. He and his Department of Chemistry colleagues work at the precise junction between layered oil and water.

“We make oil/water interfaces using membranes with nanopores, some as small as 15 nanometres,” he says. “This scale delivers the degree of sensitivity we’re after.” The scientists measure the passage of electrical currents across the tiny interfaces and detect protein, which absorbs at the boundary between the two liquids. “As long as we know a protein’s isoelectric point – that is, the pH at which it carries no electrical charge – we can measure its concentration,” he explains.

The technique enables the scientists to detect proteins at nanomolar (10⁻⁶ mol/m³) concentrations, but they hope to shift the sensitivity to the picomolar (10⁻⁹ mol/m³) range – a level of detection a thousand times more sensitive and not possible with many existing protein assessments. Further refinement may also incorporate markers to select for proteins of interest. “What we’d like to do one day is measure specific proteins in biological fluids like saliva, tears or serum,” says Arrigan.

The team’s long-term vision is to develop highly sensitive point-of-need measurements to guide treatments – for example, testing kits for paramedics to detect markers released after a heart attack so that appropriate treatment can be immediately applied.

Also in the Department of Chemistry, Dr Max Massi is developing biosensing tools to look at the health of living tissues. His approach relies on tracking the location and luminescence of constructed molecules in cells. “We synthesise new compounds based on heavy metals that have luminescent properties,” explains Massi. “Then we feed the compounds to cells, and look to see where they accumulate and how they glow.”

The team synthesises libraries of designer chemicals for their trials. “We know what properties we’re after – luminescence, biological compatibility and the ability to go to the part of the cell we want,” says Massi.

For example, compounds can be designed to accumulate in lysosomes – the tiny compartments in a cell that are involved in functions such as waste processing. With appropriate illumination, images of lysosomes can then be reconstructed and viewed in 3D using a technique known as confocal microscopy, enabling scientists to assess lysosome function. Similar approaches are in development for disease states such as obesity and cancer.

Beyond detection, this technique also has potential for therapeutic applications. Massi has performed in vitro studies with healthy and cancerous cells, suggesting that a switch from detection to treatment may be possible by varying the amount of light used to illuminate the cells.

“A bit of light allows you to visualise. A lot of light will allow you to kill the cells,” explains Massi. His approach is on track for product development, with intellectual property protection filed in relation to using phosphorescent compounds to determine the health status of cells.

Improving approaches to cancer treatment is also an ongoing research activity for materials chemist Dr Xia Lou, who designs, constructs and tests nanoparticles for targeted photodynamic therapy, which aims to selectively kill tumours using light-induced reactive oxygen species.

“We construct hybrid nanoparticles with high photodynamic effectiveness and a tumour-targeting agent, and then test them in vitro in our collaborators’ laboratories,” she says. “Our primary interest is in the treatment of skin cancer. The technology has also extended applications in the treatment of other diseases.” Lou has successfully filed patents for cancer diagnosis and treatment that support the potential of this approach.

Spheres and other 3D shapes constructed at the nanoscale offer potential for many applications centred on miniaturised storage and release of molecules and reactivity with target materials. Dr Jian Liu in the Department of Chemical Engineering develops new synthesis strategies for silica or carbon spheres, or ‘yolk-shell’-structured particles. “Our main focus is the design, synthesis and application of colloidal nanoparticles including metal, metal oxides, silica and carbon,” says Liu.

Most of these colloidal particles are nanoporous – that is, they have a lattice-like structure with pores throughout. The applications of such nanoparticles include catalysis, energy storage and conversion, drug delivery and gene therapy.

“The most practical outcome of our research would be the development of new catalysts for the production of synthetic gases, or syngas,” he says. “It may also lead to new electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.” Once developed, nanoscale components for this type of rechargeable battery are expected to bring improved safety and durability, and lower costs.

Atomic Modelling matters in research

Professor Julian Gale leads a world-class research group in computational materials chemistry at the NRI. “We work at the atomic level, looking at fundamental processes by which materials form,” he says. “We can simulate up to a million atoms or more, and then test how the properties and behaviour of the atoms change in response to different experimental conditions.” Such research is made possible through accessing a petascale computer at WA’s Pawsey Centre – built primarily to support Square Kilometre Array pathfinder research.

The capacity to model the nanoscale behaviour of atoms is a powerful tool in nanochemistry research, and can give direction to experimental work. The calcium carbonate mineral vaterite is a case in point. “Our theoretical work on calcium carbonate led to the proposal that the mineral vaterite was actually composed of at least three different forms,” Gale explains. “An international team found experimental evidence which supported this idea.”

NRI Director Professor Andrew Lowe regards this capacity as an asset. “Access to this kind of atomic modelling means that our scientists can work within a hypothetical framework to test whether a new idea is likely to work or not before they commit time and money to it,” he explains.

Scientists at Curtin’s Nanochemistry Research Institute investigate minerals at an atomic level, which can, for example, build an understanding of mineral loss in coral reefs.

New direction

Formally established in 2001, the Nanochemistry Research Institute began a new era in 2015 through the appointment of Professor Andrew Lowe as Director. Working under his guidance are academic staff and postdoctoral fellows, as well as PhD, Honours and undergraduate science students.

An expert in polymer chemistry, Lowe’s research background adds a new layer to the existing strong multidisciplinary nature of the Institute. “Polymers have the potential to impact on every aspect of fundamental research,” he says. “This will add a new string to the bow of Curtin University science and engineering, and open new and exciting areas of research and collaboration.”

Polymers are a diverse group of materials composed of multiple repeated structural units connected by chemical bonds. “My background is in water-soluble polymers and smart polymers,” explains Lowe. “These materials change the way they behave in response to their external environment – for example, a change in temperature, salt concentrations, pH or the presence of other molecules including biomolecules. Because the characteristics of the polymeric molecules can be altered in a reversible manner, they offer potential to be used in an array of applications, including drug delivery, catalysis and surface modification.”

Lowe has particular expertise in RAFT dispersion polymerisation, a technique facilitating molecular self-assembly to produce capsule-like polymers in solution. “This approach allows us to make micelles, worms and vesicles directly,” he says, describing the different physical forms the molecules can take. “It’s a novel and specialised technique that creates high concentrations of uniformly-shaped polymeric particles at the nanoscale.” Such polymers are candidates for drug delivery and product encapsulation.

– Sarah Keenihan

Highlight, Innovation, News

Australia: nation of inventors or innovators?

November 4, 2015 Heather Catchpole 2 Comments

If Australia wants to become more than just a land made up of quarries, farms and tourist beaches, it has to ensure more scientists and engineers are trained to drive innovation, warns Dr Katherine Woodthorpe, Chair of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, and panellist at last week’s inaugural Science Meets Business event.

The event, hosted by Science and Technology Australia, aimed to “kickstart a reshaped and refreshed conversation on ways to boost collaboration between Australia’s great businesses and scientists”.

Speakers at the event came from a wide range of industry, government and research, each presenting their ideas for an innovative future.

Keynote speaker Dr Larry Marshall, CEO of CSIRO, celebrated ‘deep tech’ as an ecosystem of plenty, responsible for 100% of US jobs last year. In his experience, deep tech entrepreneurship creates a virtuous cycle of innovation.

Marshall wants to meet industry halfway, working together to understand what customers want. This is not an overnight solution, he warned. “Both CSIRO and Australia will be in beta for the next five years.”

In exploring problems of “diagnosis and lifting the game”, Ken Boal, Vice President at CISCO Australia and New Zealand, said businesses should lean in more, connect with universities and help in the translation of research to the wider community.

Australia: nation of inventors or innovators?

Intrinsic to this translation of research outcomes is a STEM outreach program to schools. Professor Ian Frazer AC, Head of the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland, identified the roots of the problem beginning where schools focus on students achieving high-performance marks. Science is tough, and often students are advised to choose an easier subject to maximise their score. He also emphasised the need to place greater value on science and teachers.

Hugh Bradlow, Telstra’s Chief Scientist, suggested that technology could be part of the education solution. If technology is able to reduce costs of education, then perhaps we can pay our teachers more and attract a higher calibre of staff, he proposed.

The Hon Karen Andrews MP, representing Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, believes business and science need each other, and Australia needs both. Even though we don’t know what the jobs of the future are going to be, we know there will be core skills required, like coding and data science, she explained. Maths and statistics will be in high demand, alongside creative thinking and entrepreneurship. Andrews is putting together an action plan to connect industry and research.

While the official announcement was still under wraps, Australia’s next Chief Scientist Alan Finkel encouraged a celebration of Australia’s achievements and an effort to build upon the engagement that already exists, like relationships between Rio Tinto and the University of Sydney, and GlaxoSmithKline and Monash University.

Woodthorpe suggested that superannuation funds have a role to play in Australia’s innovation growth, and that fund managers need to realise this in order to support their next generation of members. Another barrier to innovation is the lack of digital experience in the top 300 ASX companies. Boards need to see technology as a future business model, not a piece of equipment, she said.

Newly returned from the US and now heading up Commercial Strategy at the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics at the Garvan Institute, Dr Russell J Howard has had recent success at raising capital for a new venture. He believes the three key imperatives to commercialisation success are:

To nurture smart capital, and to show founders how to create good intellectual property;
To create an innovative environment;
To enable access to experienced management – people who have experience in commercialisation.

Finally, Mr Peter Yates AM, Deputy Chairman of the Myer Family Investments talked about his own support of start-ups. He likes to collect entrepreneurs rather than artists – in 15 years both have usually increased in value!

– Karen Taylor-Brown, CEO and Publisher at Refraction Media

Agriculture, Technology

New tool for grapevines

October 28, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Featured image: courtesy of Wine Australia

A new tool for grapevines, a free phone app developed by University of Adelaide researchers, will help grape growers and viticulturists manage their vines by giving a quick measure of vine canopy size and density.

The iPad and iPhone app uses the devices’ camera and GPS capability to calculate the size and density of the vine canopy and its location in the vineyard. The aim is to help users monitor their vines and manage the required balance between vegetative growth and fruit production.

The development of the app – called VitiCanopy – has been supported by Wine Australia as part of a wider project investigating the relationships between vine balance and wine quality.

“Overcropped vines or vines with excessive canopy are referred to as ‘out-of-balance’ – generally being associated with lower quality fruit and hence lower returns,” says project leader Dr Cassandra Collins, Senior Lecturer in Viticulture with the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine.

“To achieve vine balance, grapevines require enough leaf area to ripen the fruit and produce a desired fruit quality, but not too much that it’s detrimental to fruit development through shading or a higher incidence of disease.”

Vine balance can be measured as a ratio of leaf area to fruit yield. Traditional ways, however, of measuring leaf area are tedious, laborious and time-consuming and can damage the vines – or alternatively it can require expensive and complex instruments.

“Our app offers a very simple way to measure leaf area index (LAI),” says chief investigator Dr Roberta De Bei. “This measurement can then be related to fruit yield for an assessment of vine balance as well as capture canopy variation across a vineyard. The GPS capability of the app means that information gathered can also be mapped.”

The research and development team also included Professor Steve Tyerman and Associate Professor Matthew Gilliham, University of Adelaide, and Dr Sigfredo Fuentes, University of Melbourne, and Treasury Wine Estates.

Wine Australia’s Research Development and Extension Portfolio Manager, Dr Liz Waters, says this new app will help viticulturists optimise vine balance for best grape quality.

“Wine Australia is committed to helping viticulturists manage their vines to maximise quality, profit and sustainability and to improve competitiveness across the grape and wine community. We encourage growers to explore this new tool to help them get the most from their vineyards,” says Waters.

The app is available from Apple’s app store. To use the app a grower takes a standardised image of the vine canopy. The app then analyses the image and calculates LAI, taking into account the canopy shape and density, and recording the time and location of the image. An android version of the app is being developed.

The University’s commercialisation company, Adelaide Research & Innovation (ARI), has supported the release of the app. The project was supported by Wine Australia, the University of Adelaide Wine Future initiative (formerly the Wine2030 Research Network) and The Vineyard of the Future.

This article was first published on 22 October by the University of Adelaide. Read the original article here.

About Wine Australia

Wine Australia supports a competitive wine sector by investing in research, development and extension (RD&E), growing domestic and international markets and protecting the reputation of Australian wine.

Wine Australia is funded by grape growers and winemakers through levies and user-pays charges and the Australian Government, which provides matching funding for RD&E investments.

Wine Australia is the trading name of the Australian Grape and Wine Authority, a Commonwealth statutory authority established under the Australian Grape and Wine Authority Act 2013.

Environment, News

Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science

October 25, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Australian scientists and science educators have been honoured at the annual Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science. The awards, introduced in 2000, are considered Australia’s most prestigious and highly regarded awards, and are given in recognition of excellence in scientific research, innovation and science teaching.

The awards acknowledge and pay tribute to the significant contributions that Australian scientists make to the economic and social betterment in Australia and around the world, as well as inspiring students to take an interest in science.

Previous winners include Professor Ryan Lister (Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year in 2014) for his work on gene regulation in agriculture and in the treatment of disease and mental health, and Debra Smith (Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools in 2010) for her outstanding contribution in redefining how science is taught in Queensland and across the rest of Australia.

This year’s winners were announced by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra yesterday, which was also attended by the Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb.

The 2015 recipients are:

Distinguished Professor Graham Farquhar: Prime Minister’s Prize for Science
Laureate Professor Graeme Jameson: Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation
Associate Professor Cyrille Boyer: Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year
Dr Jane Elith: Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year
Dr Ken Silburn: Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching (Secondary Schools)
Mrs Rebecca Johnson: Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching (Primary Schools)

This year’s winner of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science is Professor Graham Farquhar, Distinguished Professor of the Australian National University’s (ANU) Research School of Biology , a Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, and leader of the Science and Industry Endowment Fund project on Forests for the Future: making the most of a high [CO2] world.

Professor Farquhar’s models of plant biophysics has led to a greater understanding of cells, whole plants and forests, as well as the creation of new water-efficient wheat varieties. His work has transformed our understanding of the world’s most important biological reaction: photosynthesis.

Farquhar’s most recent research on climate change is seeking to determine which trees will grow faster in a carbon dioxide enriched atmosphere. “Carbon dioxide has a huge effect on plants. My current research involves trying to understand why some species and genotypes respond more to CO2 than others,” he says. And he and colleagues have uncovered a conundrum: global evaporation rates and wind speeds over the land are slowing, which is contrary to the predictions of most climate models. “Wind speed over the land has gone down 15% in the last 30 years, a finding that wasn’t predicted by general circulation models we use to form the basis of what climate should be like in the future,” he says. This startling discovery means that climate change may bring about a wetter world.

“Our world in the future will be effectively wetter, and some ecosystems will respond to this more than others.”

Professor Farquhar will also receive $250,000 in prize money. Looking forward he is committed to important projects, such as one with the ARC looking at the complex responses of plant hydraulics under very hot conditions.

“It’s important to understand if higher temperatures will negatively affect the plants in our natural and managed ecosystems, and if higher temperatures are damaging, we need to understand the nature of the damage and how we can minimise it.”

You can find out more about the 2015 winners including profiles, photos and videos here.

– Carl Williams

Environment, Features

Continents collide

October 14, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Collecting rock samples at 5200 m on a recent trip to the Tibetan Plateau, Professor Simon Wilde, from the Department of Applied Geology at Curtin University, was pleased to have avoided the symptoms of altitude sickness. The last time he conducted fieldwork in a similar environment had been about 20 years before in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and he’d managed then to also avoid altitude headaches. Nonetheless, he says, Tibet was tough. Due to the atmospheric conditions, the Sun was intensely strong and hot but the ground was frozen. “It’s a strange environment,” he says.

Wilde was invited by scientists at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to collect volcanic rock samples at the Tibetan site. The region is geologically significant because it is where the Indian tectonic plate is currently “driving itself under the Eurasian plate”, he explains. During their recent field trip, Wilde and his Chinese colleagues collected about 100 kg of rocks, which were couriered back to Guangzhou and Curtin for study. The researchers will be drawing on a variety of geochemistry techniques to analyse the material as they try to paint a picture of what happens when two continents collide, gaining insight into the evolution of Earth’s crust.

“We’re trying to unravel a mystery in a sense,” says Wilde. “We don’t have the full information, so we’re trying to use everything we can to build up the most likely story.”

The Guangzhou geochemists will be analysing trace elements in the rock samples to uncover information about their origins and formation. Back at Curtin, Wilde is working on determining the age of zircon crystals collected from the site, using a technique called isotopic analysis. This involves measuring the ratios of atoms of certain elements with different numbers of neutrons (isotopes) to reveal the age of crystals based on known rates of radioactive decay.

It’s work that’s providing a clearer picture of Earth’s early crustal development and is an area in which Wilde is internationally renowned (see profile, p18).

Gaining an idea of the past distribution of Earth’s continental crust has implications for the resources sector, Wilde explains. “It’s important for people working in metallogeny [the study of mineral deposits] to see where pieces of the crust have perhaps broken off and been redistributed,” he says. “There could be continuation of a mineral belt totally removed and on another continent.”

Continents collide: Copper in demand

Professor Brent McInnes, Director of the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, is also interested in the collision of tectonic plates – to help supply China’s increasing demand for domestic copper. “The rapid urbanisation of China since the 1990s has created a significant demand for a strategic supply of domestic copper, used in air conditioners, electrical motors and in building construction,” explains McInnes. Most of the world’s supply of copper comes from a specific mineral deposit type known as porphyry systems, which are the exposed roots of volcanoes formed during tectonic plate collisions.

McInnes’ research involves taking samples from drill cores, rock outcrops and mine exposures in mountainous regions around the world to be studied back in the lab. Specifically, he and his research team are able to elucidate information about the depth, erosion and uplift rate of copper deposits using a technique called thermochronology – a form of dating that takes into account the ‘closure temperature’, or temperature below which an isotope is locked into a mineral. Using this information, scientists can reveal the temperature of an ore body at a given time in its geological history. This, in turn, provides information with important implications for copper exploration, such as the timing and duration of the mineralisation process, as well as the rate of exposure and erosion.

“Institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been awarded large research grants to investigate porphyry copper deposits in mountainous terrains in southern and western China, and have sought to form collaborations with world-leading researchers in the field,” says McInnes.

“We’re trying to unravel a mystery, in a sense. We don’t have the full information, so we’re trying to use everything we can to build up the most likely story.”

Continents collide: Interpreting species loss

Professor Kliti Grice, founding Director of the WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre, researches mass extinctions. As an organic and isotope geochemist, Grice (see profile, p12) studies molecular fossils in rock sediments from 2.3 billion years ago through to the present day, also known as biomarkers. These contain carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, or sulphur – unlike the rocks, minerals and trace elements studied by inorganic geochemists Wilde and McInnes.

Grice uses tools such as tandem mass spectrometry, which enables the separation and analysis of ratios of naturally occurring stable isotopes to reconstruct ancient environments. For example, carbon has two stable isotopes – carbon-12 and carbon-13 – and one radioactive isotope, carbon-14. The latter is commonly used for dating ancient artefacts based on its rate of decay. A change in carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratios in plant molecules, however – along with a change in hydrogen – can reveal a shift in past photosynthetic activity.

Grice has uncovered the environmental conditions during Earth’s five mass extinction events and has found there were similar conditions in the three biggest extinctions – the end-Permian at 252 million years ago (Ma), end-Triassic at 201 Ma and end-Devonian at 374 Ma. Among other things, there were toxic levels of hydrogen sulphide in the oceans. Grice discovered this by studying molecules from photosynthetic bacteria, which were found to be using toxic hydrogen sulphide instead of water as an electron donor when performing photosynthesis, thereby producing sulphur instead of oxygen.

“The end-Permian and end-Triassic events were almost identical in that they are both associated with massive volcanism, rising sea levels and increased run-off from land, leading to eutrophication,” Grice explains. Eutrophication occurs when introduced nutrients in water cause excessive algal growth, reducing oxygen levels in the environment. “There were no polar ice caps at these times, and the oceans had sluggish circulations,” she adds.

In 2013, Grice co-authored a paper in Nature Scientific Reports documenting that fossils in the Kimberley showed that hydrogen sulphide plays a pivotal role in soft tissue preservation. This modern day insight is valuable for the resources sector because these ancient environments provided the conditions for many major mineral and petroleum systems. “When you have these major extinction events associated with low oxygen allowing the organic matter to be preserved – along with certain temperature and pressure conditions over time – the materials break down to produce oil and gas,” Grice says.

For example, the Permian-Triassic extinction event – during which up to 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial species disappeared – produced several major petroleum reserves. That includes deposits in Western Australia’s Perth Basin, says Grice, “and probably intervals in the WA North West Shelf yet to be discovered.”

– Gemma Chilton

Careers, Profiles

Supercontinent Revolution

October 14, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Professor of geology at Curtin University Dr Zheng-Xiang Li considers himself a very lucky man. Born in a village in Shandong Province, East China, he fondly remembers the rock formations in the surrounding hills. But he was at school during the end of the Cultural Revolution – a time when academic pursuit was frowned upon and it was very hard to find good books to read. “Fortunately, I had some very good teachers who encouraged my curiosity,” recalls Li.

He went on to secure a place at the prestigious Peking University to study geology and geophysics. And in 1984, when China’s then leader Deng Xiaoping sent a select number of students overseas, Li took the opportunity to study for a PhD in Australia. With an interest in plate tectonics and expertise in palaeomagnetism, he’s since become an authority on supercontinents.

It is widely accepted that the tectonic plates – which carry the continents – are moving, and that a supercontinent, Pangaea, existed 320–170 million years ago. Li’s research
is aimed at understanding how ‘Earth’s engine’ drives the movement of the plates.

His work has been highly influential, showing that another supercontinent, Rodinia, formed about 600 million years before Pangaea. And evidence is mounting that there was yet another ancient supercontinent before that, known as Nuna, which assembled about 1600 million years ago.

Li suspects there is a cycle wherein supercontinents break up and their components then disperse around the globe, before once again coming together as a new supercontinent.

“The supercontinent cycle is probably around 600 million years. We are in the middle of a cycle: halfway between Pangaea and a fresh supercontinent,” he says.

“We are at the start of another geological revolution. Plate tectonics revolutionised geology in the 1960s. I think we are now in the process of another revolution,” Li adds, undoubtedly excited by his work.

“The meaning of life can be described by three words beginning with ‘F’ – family, friends and fun,” he says. “And for me, work falls in the fun part.”

– Clare Pain

Innovation, News

Australian-designed SkinSuit worn on Space Station

October 14, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

It’s a long way from Melbourne to outer space, but that’s how far a SkinSuit invented at RMIT for astronauts has travelled as it undergoes trials that are – quite simply – out of this world.

The brainchild of aerospace engineer, RMIT alumnus and senior research associate Dr James Waldie, the SkinSuit has been worn by an astronaut inside the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time.

Denmark’s first astronaut, Andreas Mogensen, spent 10 days in the ISS last month and pulled on the SkinSuit to test its effectiveness in the weightless conditions.

Inspired by the striking bodysuit worn by Cathy Freeman at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Waldie and his collaborators have spent more than 15 years getting the suit into space.

“Seeing live video of Andreas wearing SkinSuit on board the ISS was thrilling – I felt an enormous sense of achievement that my concept was finally in orbit,” Waldie said.

Skin-tight and made of bi-directional elastics, SkinSuit has been designed to mimic the impact of gravity on the body to reduce the debilitating physical effects space flights have on astronauts’ bodies.

In the weightless conditions in space, astronauts can lose up to 2% bone mass per month. Their spines can also stretch by up to 7cms, with most suffering mild to debilitating pain. Following flight, astronauts have four times the risk of herniated discs as the general population.

It was while watching the Sydney Olympics, and seeing Freeman in her distinctive, skin-tight running suit that Waldie first wondered if such an outfit could help mimic the conditions on the ground for astronauts in orbit.

“Given the impact of atrophy on astronauts in space, I wondered if a suit like the one worn by Freeman could fool the body into thinking it was on the ground rather than in space, and therefore stay healthy,” he said.

The special design of the suit means it can impose a gradual increase in vertical load from the wearer’s shoulders to their feet, simulating the loading regime normally imposed by bodyweight standing on earth.

For the ISS flight, the European Space Agency wanted to explore if the suit could counteract the effects of spaceflight on the spine.

“We believe if we can reduce spinal elongation in space, we can reduce the stress on the intervertebral discs,” Waldie said.

“This should help with pain in-flight, and the chances of slipped discs post-flight.”

The suit has undergone rigorous ground and parabolic flight trials before being selected for the ISS mission. It also had to pass a spaceflight qualification programme.

As the inventor and a Principal Investigator, Waldie flew to the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, for the first on-orbit trial and was elated to see SkinSuit had finally been tested in space.

“It was really exciting but also very humbling, as there are so many people that have dedicated so much effort to this success. To share their passion, and see it all come to fruition, has been amazing.”

SkinSuit has been developed in collaboration with scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kings College London and the European Space Agency. The suit was manufactured by Italian firm Dainese, best known for producing motorbike leathers for racing.

Enjoying his first space flight, European Space Agency astronaut Mogensen tested SkinSuit over two days as part of an operational and technical evaluation.

He took frequent height measurements, comfort and mobility surveys, skin swabs for hygiene assessments, and also exercised with the suit on the station’s bicycle ergometer.

Mogensen has since returned to Earth but is yet to publicly report his findings as he undergoes extensive debriefing.

Waldie spent more time at ESA in Germany with his collaborators, workshopping further design, sizing and manufacturing refinements for SkinSuit with his RMIT colleagues Arun Vijayan and Associate Professor Lijing Wang from the School of Fashion and Textiles.

This article was first published by RMIT University. Read the original article here.

Featured photo by European Space Agency. European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen wearing the SkinSuit on board the International Space Station.

Careers, Profiles

Portrait of an engineer-politician

October 13, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

A passionate engineer, Karen Andrews is proof that studying science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) can propel you along an exciting and varied career path.

This path has led to her current role as Assistant Minister for Science and Federal Member for McPherson in Queensland. The engineer in her, however, is omnipresent.

“I’m delighted that my role in politics takes me right into the engineering sphere,” Karen says. “I always enjoyed being an engineer, and quite frankly if I get the opportunity to introduce myself as an engineer or a politician, I will always go for engineer.”

Karen’s interest in engineering started early. “When I was eight years old I remember being absolutely fascinated by the washing machine,” says Karen, recounting a childhood memory, “and how the agitator turned the same amount in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction every time.”

This curiosity of how things work drove Karen to study engineering at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where, in 1983, she and a fellow student were the first two female graduates in mechanical engineering from the university.

Karen Andrews, Assistant Minister for Science

According to Graduate Careers Australia, with women representing less than 9% of bachelor degree graduates in mechanical engineering in 2014, and the gender imbalance increasing as female participation in STEM wanes, there is still a dearth of women entering STEM.

As a trailblazer for women in engineering, Karen believes barriers to women entering STEM can be overcome.

“Some of the limitations are self-imposed,” Karen believes. “We should be making sure that as girls are going through the education system, they understand that every career choice is open to them. And with careers advisors too, we have to make sure there isn’t an unintentional gender bias in the advice that’s being given to women.”

After graduating, Karen cut her teeth working at power stations and petrochemical sites across Queensland and interstate. This was the mid-1980s, a time of significant industrial volatility in the Australian oil industry.

Karen’s supervisory role often meant receiving delegations from shop stewards; individuals elected by workers to represent them in dealings with management. “Shop stewards were pointing out to me the reasons why they couldn’t do the things I was asking them to do,” says Karen, as she described some of her early experiences in this demanding environment. “This encouraged me to go off and study industrial relations (IR). I was attracted to IR to see how I could make things better at the work place.”

As a natural communicator, Karen pursued her interests in IR joining the Chamber of Manufacturers as an industrial advocate in the Metals, Engineering and Construction industry.

“If you’re going to communicate, first and foremost you have to be a good listener,” explains Karen. “You have to listen to what people are saying to you in the first place before you can respond and work through a solution.”

With Karen’s communication skills honed in IR, and refined while running her own Human Resources and IR consultancy, Karen decided to pursue a long-held interest in politics. And with characteristic drive and determination she was elected for the seat of McPherson, southern Gold Coast in 2009.

“The adversarial parts of IR are similar to the adversarial parts of politics, says Karen. “In IR you are working closely with employers and employees trying to achieve an outcome that’s in the best interests of that business. The same thing applies in politics, but on a larger scale because you’re looking at what is in the best interests of Australia.”

Karen’s engineering background and career path afford her a unique perspective on the potential future for STEM in Australia.

“I think there will be exciting new careers in analysing big data,” says Karen. “So we’ll need people who are going to be able to analyse that data and turn it into usable information. So I think there will be plenty of opportunities for data analysts and people with higher maths skills.”

“There will also be lots of opportunities in the coming years in astronomy, and particularly is marine sciences where we are already world-leaders,” says Karen.

– Carl Williams

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