The Royal Society of Tasmania

The advancement of knowledge

.

Dr Andreas Klocker, IMAS ARC DECRA fellow – Sistema Huautla – Cave diving for exploration and science in one of the world’s most spectacular deep caves – Tuesday Jun 5, 2018 @8 pm Royal Society Room, TMAG Hobart

Tuesday Jun 5, 2018 @8 pm Royal Society Room, TMAG Hobart

Dr Klocker will talk about the 2016, 2017, and 2018 caving and cave diving expeditions he led to Sistema Huautla, one of the world’s deepest cave systems located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.  The goal of the expeditions is to connect Sistema Huautla with its outlet in the remote Santo Domingo Canyon about 10 kilometers from its entrance.  The successful connection of Sistema Huautla with its outlet would result in the world’s deepest and most spectacular cave traverse.

Dr Klocker will focus in particular on the March 2018 expedition which promises to be one of the most ambitious and challenging cave diving projects ever attempted as the divers attempt to surpass the previous limit of exploration, some five kilometers underground, reached in 1984 when logistical challenges halted progress.

Dr Klocker, originally from Austria, completed a diploma in marine environmental science in Germany, and moved to Hobart to work as honorary research fellow at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC.  He undertook a PhD as part of the UTAS-CSIRO joint PhD program in Quantitative Marine Science, followed by a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on ocean turbulence in the Southern Ocean.  He returned to Australia as a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Climate System Science and the Australian National University.  Dr Klocker was then awarded an ARC DECRA Fellowship at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies continuing his specialist work on ocean turbulence.

Dr Klocker got hooked by caving in 2008 while doing his PhD, and soon after combined his caving and diving addiction to become a cave diver in 2011.  In Australia his main focus has been on cave exploration in the Junee-Florentine in Tasmania, an area known for Australia’s deepest cave systems, remote sumps and huge exploration potential.  In the last couple years he also turned his attention towards major cave systems in Mexico, in particular Sistema Huautla, where he enjoys the challenge of combining deep ‘dry’ caving and challenging cave diving in one of the world’s most amazing cave systems.

Ms Sophie Muller, Director of the Tasmanian Climate Change Office in the Department of Premier and Cabinet – Putting the change in climate change – Tuesday 1 May, 2018 @8 pm in Royal Society Room, TMAG

There is a growing recognition of climate-related financial risk and legal liability for government and businesses. Increasing stakeholder demand for disclosure of climate change risks and opportunities, and a legal liability risk associated with failing to incorporate climate change in decision making are key drivers for change. Technology is also a major impetus for change with transformation in the transport sector representing a significant opportunity for Tasmania.  The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 rated failure of climate change adaptation and mitigation as the most impactful risk to the global economy over the next decade. This talk will explore what’s changed in climate change.
Sophie Muller is the Director of the Tasmanian Climate Change Office in the Department of Premier and Cabinet. She leads the Tasmanian Government response to climate change including policy and projects focusing on addressing the State’s emissions, the transition to a low carbon economy and responding to the impacts of climate change through adaptation. Sophie is a graduate of the University of Tasmania with a Master of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts. She has worked in the climate change field for the past five years and has held roles across government in tourism, health and education. Sophie is passionate about driving change in complex public policy areas to achieve positive outcomes for the Tasmanian community.

Lecture at 8 pm Royal Society Room, TMAG Customs House building. Enter through Dunn Place car park and look for the RST banners at the entrance.

Prof Michael Breadmore, 2017 M.R. Banks medal recipient – Chemical answers now – safer food, water and environment through chemistry on a chip – Tuesday April 10 @8 pm Royal Society Room

Tuesday April 10, 2018, 8 pm Royal Society Room

The development of smart phones and smart watches and our always-connected lifestyle has meant that we are able to obtain information about a myriad of things in an instant of a second.  You can find out where the closest restaurant is, get directions from your current location, and even an estimation of the calorific value of the food by taking a photo.  But it can’t tell you whether the fish on your plate is safe to eat, nor whether the water is safe to drink.  To do this, we need an entirely new generation of sensors, that requires transferring the measurement from the lab out into our life.  Over the past 20 years, Professor Breadmore has focused on simplifying the chemical processes involved in such measurements for therapeutics, pollutants and explosives, and the ways in which this type of technology can be made to increase the likelihood of commercial uptake and the development of products.  It is a long path, with many remaining challenges and problems to solve, but sometime in our lifetimes, there will be something to measure what you want to know right now.

Professor Michael Breadmore was born and educated in Tasmania, graduating from the University of Tasmania with a PhD in analytical chemistry in 2001 before spending 3 years undertaking postdoctoral research in the US (University of Virginia), Switzerland (University of Bern) and the United Kingdom (deltaDOT).  He returned to Australia and Tasmania as an ARC Postdoctoral fellow (2004-2008) which led to an ARC QEII Fellowship (2009-2013) and an ARC Fellowship (2014-2017), all within the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS).  He has made significant contributions to the field of analytical chemistry over the past 20 years to simplify the design and fabrication of portable analytical technology and applying these to challenging current and emerging analytical problems facing society.

Lecture at 8 pm Royal Society Room, TMAG Customs House building. Enter through Dunn Place car park and look for the RST banners at the entrance.

2018 AGM guest speaker Rosalie Martin – 2017 Tasmanian of the Year – Tuesday 6 March Central Gallery, TMAG @7.30 pm AGM, 7.45 pm for Drinks, 8 pm Lecture

The Society is very pleased to present this year’s guest speaker Rosalie Martin – 2017 Tasmanian of the Year.
Transforming lives – the role of speech pathology in improving prisoners’ lives and society’s future
Rosalie Martin, Tasmanian of the Year 2017, made a phone call to the Risdon Prison in 2013 and sat in the Australian of the Year Awards in 2017.  She will share this journey, its stories, and the evidence behind the work of Just Sentences – evidence that keeps her shoulder to the wheel of systems-change.
The Just Sentences pilot project brings speech pathology support to the literacy programs of a small number of inmates within the Tasmania Prison Service.  These are men whose literacy skills have not yet moved very far along the literacy continuum.  But they can!  And they have!  With the right kind of extra support, many lives which are currently warehoused can be transformed.
Rosalie is a criminologist, an accredited facilitator with the Center for Courage & Renewal, and a clinical speech pathologist with more than 30 years’ experience. In 2013 Rosalie founded a charity, Chatter Matters Tasmania, to bring literacy and parent-child attachment programs to Tasmania’s Risdon Prison. She was awarded 2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year for the work she began at the prison. She is grateful for the platform this recognition has afforded her to promote the value of kind communication in evidence-based service delivery. And she is ever-grateful to all family, friends and colleagues. Nothing that is worth doing is ever done alone.

 

Dr Tas van Ommen – Ice cores and climate: looking back over a million years of earth history – Sep 5, 8 pm @Royal Society Room TMAG

Ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland have reshaped our understanding of how the climate system operates. We see in the cycles of temperature and carbon dioxide the pulse of the ice ages back to 800 thousand years. Ice core records for recent millennia show detailed changes that are linked to drivers of Australian climate such as the westerlies or El Niño from which we can infer past periods of drought. Australia has been a leading nation in ice coring, particularly in East Antarctica, with a focus on studies of climate over recent millennia and into the last ice age. Now, an international initiative is maturing to drill for a continuous record extending into the very oldest ice, more than a million years old. Australia has announced its plans to lead such an expedition, which will commence early next decade. This talk will look at why such an old ice core record matters, and how the project might proceed.
Dr Tas van Ommen is the leader of climate research with the Australian Antarctic Division. Tas has participated in six research expeditions to Antarctica, drilling ice cores and conducting airborne surveys of the ice and bedrock beneath. In his most recent trip he drove a tractor in a traverse across some 1300 km of the continent, crossing areas never previously visited. His research interests centre around high resolution ice core studies, connections with Australian climate and the stability and future of the Antarctic ice sheet. Tas is leading the Australian project to drill the ‘million year’ ice core and is also co-chair of the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences, an international planning body behind the search for this oldest ice core.

Saul Eslake – Australia’s ongoing quest for ever-greater ‘security’ – is it rational and has it made us safer?  – Tues Nov 14, 6 pm @Government House, Hobart

FEBRUARY 29, 2012: PERTH, WA. Economist Saul Eslake. (Photo by Theo Fakos / Newspix)

Saul will revisit one of the propositions he spoke to the society about in his last lecture in 2005 (link).  A secure and safe society is a necessary pillar for progress.  Given the government investment in measures to produce, maintain and support security it is time to ask if the costs to our economy and to our social fabric are worth the outcomes.

Saul Eslake worked as an economist in the Australian financial markets for more than 25 years, including as Chief Economist at McIntosh Securities (a stockbroking firm) in the late 1980s, Chief Economist (International) at National Mutual Funds Management in the early 1990s, as Chief Economist at the Australia & New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) from 1995 to 2009, and as Chief Economist (Australia & New Zealand) for Bank of America Merrill Lynch from 2011 until June 2015. In between these last two positions he was Director of the Productivity Growth program at the then newly-established Grattan Institute, a ‘think tank’.

In July 2015 Saul started up his own economics consultancy business, operating out of Hobart, and in April 2016 took up a part-time position as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Tasmania.

Saul is a non-executive director of Hydro Tasmania, an energy business owned by the Tasmanian State Government; and of Housing Choices Australia Ltd, a not-for-profit provider of affordable rental housing.  He is also Chairman of Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania’s bi-ennial state-wide multi-arts festival.

Saul has a first class honours degree in Economics from the University of Tasmania, and a Graduate Diploma in Applied Finance and Investment from the Securities Institute of Australia. In December 2012 he was awarded an Honorary LLD degree by the University of Tasmania. He has also completed the Senior Executive Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in New York.

 

Assoc Prof Tracey Dickson – Cortical Inhibitory Dysfunction in Motor Neuron Disease: How can we get the balance back – Nov 7, 8 pm @Royal Society Room TMAG

University of Tasmania, Menzies Institute for Medical Research.
Deputy Director Menzies Institute for Medical Research
Associate Professor Tracey Dickson
16/05/2016
picture – Peter Mathew

There are no treatments or cures for Motor Neuron Disease, and most people with the illness die three to five years after diagnosis. For the past 10 years Associate Professor Dickson’s group at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research has been investigating the fundamental mechanisms of this devastating disease, trying to unravel the causes and determine where it begins. In the next three years they will be using this knowledge to perform critical research to determine whether they can repurpose an existing drug for the treatment of MND. This work takes them one more step along the translation pipeline from the bench to the bedside – in this case from the laboratory to the clinic. A/Prof Dickson’s presentation will reflect on her research journey, the unexpected findings, the challenges and the rewards.

Associate Professor Dickson (BSc, PhD) is a neuroscientist with a national and international reputation in determining the pathological basis underlying Motor Neuron Disease, Parkinson’s disease and the neuronal response to trauma. She is the Deputy Director and Associate Director for Research at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research and Leader of the Neurodegenerative disease and Trauma Theme. She leads an ambitious and productive research team at Menzies consisting of three post-docs, six PhD students, one research assistant and one honours student. Associate Professor Dickson was previously an National Health and Medical Research Council Career Development Fellow (2008-2012), and Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow (2001-2004), where she spent two years at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. A/Prof Dickson’s work has resulted in 70 original research papers and she has secured competitive funding for her research of over $7.5 million. A/Prof Dickson has an excellent record in supervising RHD students, with 13 PhD completions.

http://www.utas.edu.au/profiles/staff/menzies/tracey-dickson

Prof Maggie Walter – Looking Back to Move Forward: The Royal Society and Tasmanian Aborigines – Oct 3, 8 pm @Royal Society Room TMAG

The Royal Society of Tasmania has a long history of supporting the advancement of knowledge within Tasmania.  Yet, the deep dark shadow of the Royal Society’s behaviour towards Tasmanian Aborigines remains largely undisturbed, tarnishing this history and forestalling the possibility of a contemporary relationship with Tasmanian Aboriginal people. This presentation details the Royal Society’s role in the post-mortem desecration of William Lanne and trucanini, and subsequent exploitation of their remains, from an historical and from an Aboriginal perspective. The purpose is to stimulate a discussion on how this history can be acknowledged as a prerequisite to a process of reconciliation between the Society and Tasmanian Aboriginal people and communities.

Maggie Walter (PhD) is member of the Briggs/Johnson Tasmanian Aboriginal family, descended from the pairrebenne people of North Eastern Tasmania. She is also Professor of Sociology and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Aboriginal Research and Leadership at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Maggie’s scholarship centres on the social and cultural positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and she has published extensively in the field of race relations, inequality and research methods/methodologies. Recent books include: Indigenous Children Growing Up Strong: A longitudinal study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families (2017) (Edited with K.L. Martin and G. Bodkin-Andrews, Palgrave McMillan) Indigenous statistics: a quantitative methodology (with C. Andersen, Left Coast Press 2013) and Social Research Methods (ed) 3rd Edition (Oxford University Press 2013).