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.
Jim Palfreyman – The 2016 Glitch of the Vela Pulsar – Sun Feb 25 2018 @1.30 pm in the Meeting Room, QVMAG at Inveresk
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
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
