The Royal Society of Tasmania

The advancement of knowledge

2018 Northern branch lectures

FEBRUARY 25 Jim Palfreyman “2016 Glitch of the Vela Pulsar” – In a world first, the only ever pulsar glitch observed in action with a large radio telescope. Right here in Tasmania.

** ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING 1.15 pm March 25 **

MARCH 25 Prof Pat Quilty “Highlights of Tasmania’s Antarctic Exploration – Scott (why Scott?) and others” – Tasmania has long been a major location for Antarctica explorers. Researching their history has revealed some eye-opening surprises.

APRIL 22 Prof Hamish Maxwell-Stewart “Height, Health and History in Victoria and Tasmania 1850-1920” – How human stature can be used to explore early life disadvantage.

MAY 27 Dr Alison Alexander “Jane Franklin – the Real Founder of the Royal Society of Tasmania?” – The woman who organised, dominated, persuaded and commanded the men around her to co-operate in forming a scientific society.

JUNE 24 Dr Karin Orth “Mega Volcanic Eruptions and the Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time.” – Can Earth’s own internal heat engine driving volcanism be the harbinger of mass extinction?

JULY 22 Dr Caitlyn Vertigan “Shoot. Catalogue. Eat: Interacting with Nature at a Tasmanian Penal Station” – The early history of the Port Arthur penal station (1830-77) was filled with scientific exploration that today might be considered somewhat outside the accepted scientific regime.

** SCIENCE WEEK: AUGUST 11-19 **

AUGUST 26 Assoc Prof Jonathan Binns “Why Does an Engineer Need a PhD?” – Real problems in industry, defence and sport tackled with research and innovation, in Tasmania, Australia and the World.

SEPTEMBER 23 Dr Patsy Cameron “Voices From the Other Side of the Colonial Frontier” – A story of the social, cultural and spiritual survival of a unique people who lived on the Bass Strait islands from 1810.

OCTOBER 28 TBA “Breaking New Ground” – PhD students from the University of Tasmania will be presenting synopses and answering questions about their current research and progress. Topics TBA.

** The Annual QVMAG Staff Lecture**

NOVEMBER 25 David Maynard “Tasmania’s Forgotten Emus” – Before the thylacine there were other less well-known extinctions, including the Tasmanian emu soon after European arrival.

Mr Martin George – Planet, Planets Everywhere: Our search for other Solar Systems – 1.30 pm Sun Nov 26, QVMAG Inveresk

Astronomers had long assumed that there were planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, but it is only since the 1990s that we obtained evidence that this was true.   Now we know of thousands of these planets, making it clear to us that planetary systems are common.  However, except in a few special cases, we have never seen any of them.  The speaker will explain the various methods that are used to detect them and to discover a good deal of information about their orbits and characteristics.

Martin George is Manager of the Launceston Planetarium at QVMAG.  He is a well-known communicator of astronomy to the public, with several regular radio interviews and a weekly space article in The Mercury newspaper.   He is also a contributing editor of the US magazine Astronomy.

Martin is a fellow and former president of the International Planetarium Society and is its Chair of International Relations. He has been awarded the David Allen Prize for astronomy communication by the Astronomical Society of Australia, and the Winifred Curtis Medal for Science Communication in Tasmania.

Launceston Lecture Series
Meeting Room, QVMAG at Inveresk
RSVP by Thu Nov 23: bookings@qvmag.tas.gov.au
Small fee for non-members
1.30 pm Sun Nov 26

 

 

 

BOOK NOW The RST Christmas lecture and dinner 2017

The President, Prof Matt King and all Council members warmly invite you, your family and friends to attend The Royal Society of Tasmania annual Christmas lecture and dinner.

This relaxed evening is one of the Society’s most popular events and we hope you can attend.

Emeritus Prof John Simons will speak to the topic of ‘Queen Victoria’s Hippopotamus’ at CSIRO’s Battery Point auditorium at 6 pm on Tuesday 5 December 2017, followed by a buffet Christmas dinner.

Tickets are $45 per person and available through trybooking:

https://www.trybooking.com/SMSS

In 1850 the Zoological Society of London acquired a hippopotamus.  He was called Obaysch. He was the first hippopotamus to have been seen in Europe since Roman times and caused a sensation. This lecture will look at his life and at the various ways in which Victorians constructed the experience of seeing a hippopotamus in London.

Emeritus Professor John Simons lives in Taroona. He has worked in universities in the U.K., the USA and Australia and most recently was Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University. He is the editor or author of some twenty academic books on a range of topics from medieval chivalric romance to the history of cricket via Andy Warhol. Over the last twenty years he has concentrated on the history of human-animal relationships and, especially, on exotic animals in Victorian England. He is also a published poet and has recently completed his first novel.

The menu for the dinner. A vegetarian meal is available on request, please contact royal.society@tmag.tas.gov.au:

If you have any queries, please contact us at royal.society@tmag.tas.gov.au or Wednesdays from 9.30 to 1.30 on 03 6165 7014.

Dr Anita Hansen – 175 years of the Royal Society of Tasmania – Oct 22, 1.30 pm @Meeting Room, QVMAG Inveresk

On October 14 2018, The Royal Society of Tasmania will be celebrating 175 years. It is the third oldest Royal Society, with only the Royal Society and the Edinburgh Royal Society predating it. The lecture will examine the Society and its influence on the history and culture of Tasmania. There will also be a discussion of events planned to celebrate the anniversary.

Dr Anita Hansen has been an artist all her life, working in Tasmania, interstate and overseas. She holds a doctorate from the University of Tasmania, a Master of Fine Arts, a Graduate Diploma in Plant and Wildlife Illustration and a Bachelor of Fine Art degree. Anita co-edited The Royal Society of Tasmania’s book The Library at the End of the World: Natural Science and Its Illustrators and has published a number of journal articles, as well as curating exhibitions in Tasmania and interstate.

Dr Claire Hawkins – Extinction matters: could citizen science help? – Sep 24, 1.30 pm @Meeting Room, QVMAG Inveresk

Twenty-seven species are listed as having gone extinct from Tasmania in recent times. Threatened Species Day (7 September) marks the date since the last known thylacine died, in 1936. It’s a time to reflect on why extinction matters to us, and how we might reduce our negative impacts on species survival. My own response, as a threatened species zoologist, has been to take up a Churchill Fellowship on citizen science, to engage the wider community in better understanding the needs of the plants and animals in their own backyards. In this talk, I share my findings on how this might work most effectively. Dr Clare Hawkins carried out her Ph.D. on the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), a semi-arboreal mammalian carnivore endemic to the forests of Madagascar. Its ecological similarities to the spotted-tailed quoll (Dasyurus maculatus) brought her to Tasmania in 2001 to study the latter species’ habitat requirements. She subsequently joined the State Government, initially with the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, and spent four years monitoring the impact and distribution of Devil Facial Tumour Disease. She is currently the IUCN Australasian Marsupial and Monotreme Specialist Group Red List coordinator and author of the Naturetrackers blog. For the Bookend Trust, she co-organised two ‘Extinction Matters’ BioBlitzes in 2016, held on either side of Threatened Species Day, to be reprised this year in November. Her current focus is on novel approaches to better monitor and manage Tasmania’s diverse threatened fauna (from quolls and eagles to skinks, butterflies and burrowing crayfish). In 2015, she was awarded a Gallaugher Bequest Churchill Fellowship to develop citizen science study designs for long term monitoring.

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