Dr Ryan Taft, from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, studies the 98 percent of our DNA that isn’t genes.

Until recently this DNA was badged as ‘junk’ by genetic researchers, but Dr Taft is part of a team turning this thinking on its head.

“Humans are much more complex than animals such as sea sponges, but we have roughly the same number of genes,” Dr Taft said.

“This doesn’t make sense unless we include junk DNA in our comparisons.

“The amount of junk DNA increases as animals become more complex, suggesting this genetic material, previously thought to be hitching a ride at the expense of genes, is actually playing an important role.”

Dr Taft has discovered tiny chemical keys among this ‘junk’ DNA that may switch genes on and off.

Controlling the function of genes is vital for human health, so these keys may play an important role in understanding and treating diseases.

“In diseases such as cancer, genes are turned on when they should be off or vice versa. Using these keys may allow us to control gene expression and reverse the effect of such diseases,” he said.

Although a treatment like this is still many years away, the era of diseases being treated by examining a patient’s genetic code is drawing closer every day.

“It took over a decade and billions of dollars to map the first human genome,” Dr Taft said.

“Now, we have machines at IMB that can map a genome in a couple of weeks for several thousand dollars.

“The technology is improving all the time, so we face the very real prospect that, in the not-too-distant future, you will go to the doctor and have your DNA sequenced in order to have your disease diagnosed and the right treatment prescribed.

“Personalised medicine based on your DNA will lead to improved treatments and better outcomes for patients.

“There’s never been a better time to be a biologist.”

Dr Taft’s profile and video can be viewed online

Voting for the Eureka Prize People’s Choice Award is open until August 15.

Profiles of Dr Taft and the five other finalists will air on Catalyst on Thursday 29 July.

Eight University of Sydney academics have been shortlisted today for the 2010 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes.

The shortlist of scientific excellence recognises the year’s most innovative and influential scientists, together with the country’s top science communicators and teachers.

In its 21st year, the annual celebration, dubbed the “Oscars of Australian science” offers 20 awards with total prize money of $190,000.

New prizes for this year include Early Career Research, Outstanding Medical Research Translation, Innovation in Computer Science, and Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge.

Winners will be announced at the annual Award Dinner to be held on 17 August 2010. It is an event which has become the largest national celebration of the achievements of Australian science.

The University congratulates the eight University of Sydney academics to have been shortlisted today for the 2010 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes. They are as follows:

Professor Manfred Lenzen, Dr Christopher Dey and Dr Joy Murray from the School of Physics are finalists for the Eureka Prize for Innovative Solutions to Climate Change for their adaptation of an economic theory to estimate the impacts of our actions in terms of many sustainability indicators. This accounting-physics hybrid relies on mathematics, large scale data handling, complex systems and integrated science. A consistent model has been created that calculates all supply chain interactions in economies, from local to global scale, and simultaneously links them to physical processes such as land/energy/water use, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Associate Professor David Moss from the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science is a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science for making significant advances in overcoming conventional computer chips which are fast becoming obsolete by inventing a laser optical source with multiple wavelengths that can be used to transmit information optically over existing silicon (CMOS) integrated circuits.

Dr John Forge from the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science is a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics for his book, The Responsible Scientist: A Philosophical Inquiry, which addresses the responsibilities of scientists for the outcomes of their research. Combining moral reasoning with an understanding of modern science, Forge argues that scientists should be held responsible not just for what they do, but for consequences they should have known about or anticipated, and moreover that they are obliged to refrain from certain sorts of research and encouraged to participate in others.

Professor David Celermajer from the Discipline of Medicine is a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science for nurturing the careers of young medical graduates. He has exerted great influence to improving the clinical science of cardiovascular medicine and through his highly practical approach to mentoring, has significantly replenished the dwindling ranks of the Clinician Scientist in the medical field.

Professor Bruce Sutton from the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources together with Associate Professor Greg Leslie, University of New South Wales are finalists for the Professor Peter Cullen Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation for developing a low energy system for irrigating with saline water. By integrating reverse osmosis membranes into drip irrigation lines, they have developed a very efficient system for farmers to grow crops using saline water, including groundwater, without damaging the soil.

Associate Professor Paul McGreevy from the Faculty of Veterinary Science is a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Scientific Research that Contributes to Animal Protection for showing in his research the relationship between breed standards and genetic disorders in dogs. Associate Professor McGreevy’s work has also created solutions such as better disease surveillance and breeding, and public education about welfare issues that prevail in certain breeds.

Today’s announcement coincides with the opening of voting for the Eureka Prize People’s Choice Award for 2010. Visit the Eureka Prize website to vote for Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths, an Honorary Associate of Astronomy. As a senior post-doctoral fellow at CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, Professor McClure-Griffiths has been recognised for making a giant map of hydrogen in the Milky Way which gives insights into how the galaxy was created. Read more about Professor McClure-Griffiths’ nomination.

Last year the People’s Choice award was won by Dr Kathy Belov, from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Veterinary Science, for her research into genetics and the tumours plaguing the Tasmanian Devil.

For more information, visit the 2010 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes website.

The Faculty of Science has been successful in having two Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence funded from 2011 in the latest round of funding announced on 16 July 2010. The two new Centres, based within the School of Physics, have been funded for a total of $44.4 million from the Australian Research Council.

The two Centres are the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics, with Professor Bryan Gaensler from the School of Physics as Centre Director, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems with Professor Ben Eggleton, also from the School of Physics, as Centre Director.

The Australian Research Council received 111 Expressions of Interest for funding for ARC Centres of Excellence across Australia in this round of funding, and approved funding for 13 of these.

Aiming to enhance and develop Australia’s research excellence through highly innovative and collaborative research, the ARC Centres of Excellence scheme builds Australia’s human capacity in a range of research areas.

Receiving $20.6 million over seven years, the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics, or CAASTRO for short, will boost Australia’s outstanding track record as a world leader in astronomy, and will solve fundamental processing problems that can potentially be applied to communications, medical imaging and remote sensing.

“This is a hugely exciting development for Australian astronomy. Our country has invested massively in new telescopes, and also in powerful computers to analyse all the data that these instruments will produce. But now through CAASTRO we can ensure that it will be Australian scientists who are taking the lead on these facilities, and that it will be our students and other young researchers who will be making ground-breaking discoveries,” said Professor Bryan Gaensler.

Professor Ben Eggleton will be the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems.

“CAASTRO activities will have a strong focus on training the next generation of scientists, providing a legacy extending well beyond the Centre’s lifetime. The students we mentor will lead the scientific discoveries made on future wide-field facilities, culminating in the ultimate all-sky telescope – the Square Kilometre Array,” explained Professor Gaensler.

Centre Director, Professor Gaensler, will be joined by School of Physics colleagues: Professor Elaine Sadler and Associate Professor Scott Croom who are both Chief Investigators, and Dr Tara Murphy who is an Associate Investigator, in addition to Chief Investigators from the partner organisations.

Spanning 17 partner organisations, CAASTRO has 32 named investigators, and aims to hire 25 scientific staff and nine support and administration staff in the first year, making CAASTRO a group of around 65 staff, plus students.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems – known as CUDOS – has secured $23.8 million funding over seven years. Centre Director, Professor Ben Eggleton, will be joined by Chief Investigators from the School of Physics: Professor Martijn de Sterke, Professor Ross McPhedran and Dr Boris Kuhlmey in addition to Chief Investigators from the partner organisations.

“This is a new Centre of Excellence that builds on the strong foundation of the current CUDOS with new Chief Investigators, new international links and end-user partnerships and a new vision,” explained Professor Eggleton.

“We will build a world-leading research centre to create technology that will revolutionise information systems, create and develop Australian industry, and train and mentor young researchers in the science and application of nanophotonics and photonic processing,” said Professor Eggleton.

“The outcomes will fuel research and development programs for decades, harnessing links between fundamental research and commercial applications through industry partners and start-up companies, and developing strong linkages between Australian and overseas universities and companies.”

The new CUDOS is a collaboration across seven Australian universities and has major international links with partner organisations around the world.

“The Centre will take the next big step in optical systems by transforming photonic integrated circuits into a technology that will have a profound effect on economies and lifestyles around the world. This will enable the Internet to transfer vast amounts of data with significantly improved energy efficiency; it will lead to secure transmission using quantum photonics-based devices, and to the detection of mid-infrared signatures of light from distant stars and complex molecules of environmental or biochemical importance. We will achieve this by developing functional metamaterials with optical properties to control light and engineering them into miniature photonic processors,” explained Professor Eggleton.

A former ANU scholar, and the only Australian running a tier oneteaching and research university in the United States, President McRobbie has made significant contributions in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational science, as well as university leadership and innovation.

President McRobbie is responsible for IU’s eight campus system which has a total budget of around US $2.7 billion, and over 5000 faculty, 11,000 staff, and 100,000 students. IU is an international leader in professional, medical and technological education with a strong tradition in the liberal arts and sciences.

There is a significant and growing partnership between ANU and IU. Last September, ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb and President McRobbie signed a Memorandum that has seen the establishment of the
ANU-IU Pan Asia Institute. Joint language courses and other student and staff exchanges are already underway at the institute, which combines the complementary academic strengths of the two universities into asingle research and teaching enterprise.

“President McRobbie has made an outstanding contribution to research management and institutional leadership in higher education as a scholar, an educator, an innovator and a leader in academe and the wider
community,” Professor Chubb said.

President McRobbie studied philosophy at ANU, earning his Ph.D. in 1979. Several years later, he became head of the University’s Automated Reasoning Project, which elevated Australia’s profile in the field of
artificial intelligence and led to the development of the ANU Centre for Information Science Research and the Cooperative Research Centre for Advanced Computational Systems. While at ANU, McRobbie served as
executive director of both centres.

Professor Chubb praised the contributions President McRobbie had made to major research collaborations between ANU and Fujitsu, Japan’s largest IT services provider, and the development of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network, a high-performance research and education network that McRobbie co-founded to provide broadband connectivity among research communities in Australia, North America and East Asia.

“Throughout this period in his career, entrepreneurial achievements were paralleled by scholarly contributions to logic, computer science and information technology,” Professor Chubb said.

President McRobbie was made an honorary member of The Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2007 and this year was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to tertiary education,
particularly through administrative roles, and for contributions in the field of information technology and in developing international alliances between universities.”

Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths, an Honorary Associate of Astronomy at the School of Physics, has been shortlisted for the Eureka Prizes People’s Choice Award 2010 for scientific research.

As a senior post-doctoral fellow at CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, Professor McClure-Griffiths has been recognised for making a giant map of hydrogen in the Milky Way which gives insights into how the galaxy was created.

Her project, the Galactic All-Sky Survey (GASS) mapped all of the hydrogen gas in the southern sky.

Professor McClure-Griffiths said the project required 2500 hours of observation over three years and has produced a far more detailed map than has been possible before.

“Generally it gives a better 3D picture of what our galaxy looks like and how it was formed,” she said.

Voting for the People’s Choice Award starts on 22 July and the public will be encouraged to ask questions, view profiles and videos of the six finalists before voting online.

An image of the hydrogen gas in the entire Southern sky from the Galactic All-Sky survey showing the Milky Way disk, its halo and the nearby Magellanic Clouds.

“I think it is a great way of showcasing astronomy to the wider public and it encourages everyone, especially children, to take an interest in science.”

‘Australia’s favourite scientist’ will be announced at the annual award dinner on 17 August. This event has become the largest national celebration of the achievements of Australian science.

The Eureka Prizes People’s Choice Award is supported by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

Professor McClure-Griffiths was also nominated for the Eureka Early Career Research Prize valued at $10,000 and the finalists for this section will be announced next week.

Professor McClure-Griffiths won the 2006 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist and is also recognised as an international expert on the Milky Way.

For more information, visit the Eureka Prizes website.

Media enquiries: Rachel Gleeson, 0403 067 342, 9351 4312, rachel.gleeson@sydney.edu.au



• Professor Gerard Milburn will lead the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems which has received $24.5 million for an ambitious quantum research program involving partners in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Sweden, the UK and USA.

• Professor Hugh Possingham will lead the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) which has received $11.9 million funding in the ARC round. The centre has research partners in Australia and Israel, Germany, Finland, South Africa, UK and the USA.

Professor Milburn said the future of technology lay in controlling the quantum world.

Although quantum principles are not fully understood, quantum technologies are already responsible for many advances in technology we already use including lasers and their many applications, magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), modern micro circuitry, plus CDs and DVDs.

Promising quantum technologies include super quantum computers, ultra secure quantum codes to safeguard our communications, and even teleportation.

“The ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQuS) will deliver the building blocks of future quantum technologies and, critically, ensure Australian primacy in this endeavour,” Professor Milburn said.

“Three strategic research programs will target Quantum Measurement and Control; Synthetic Quantum Systems and Simulation; and Quantum-Enabled Sensors and Metrology.

“Within these programs, our Centre will exploit the deepest principles and resources of quantum physics to solve specific problems in engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine, stimulating the Australian scientific and engineering communities to exploit (and benefit from) transformative quantum devices.”

Professor Milburn said from the bronze age to the silicon age, the wealth of nations rose and fell on a tide of technological innovation.

“The new centre will produce novel devices and technologies through the engineering of quantum coherent systems, enabling powerful new applications across a range of fields,” he said.

It would develop a comprehensive framework for training and mentoring a new generation of scientists and engineers as part of an internationally-prominent, Australian-led research agenda.

Professor Possingham said despite facing the sixth global mass extinction of species, most conservation management was unevaluated and inefficient.

“The ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions will provide international research leadership in tackling the complex problems of environmental management and monitoring in an uncertain world,” he said.

“Working through six Australian universities and six international organisations, the Centre will forge new approaches and tools from ecology, mathematics, statistics, economics and the social sciences.

“It will lead the world in developing and delivering predictive models and decision-making approaches to improve outcomes in conservation management, habitat restoration, spatial planning and threat adaptation under a changing climate.”

Professor Possingham said Australia had the worst extinction record of any developed nation.

“Biodiversity underpins the cultural and economic prosperity of Australia, but our interventions to protect this natural inheritance are proving inadequate,” he said.

“Furthermore, our environmental management efforts have not been managed in such a way that allows us to learn from our investment decisions.

“The new centre will generate the fundamental knowledge and tools needed to make the best use of available resources for conservation.

“It will provide new techniques for assessing what resources are required and innovative ways for learning from our investment decisions.”

UQ Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Max Lu congratulated the two new UQ-led Centres of Excellence, which reflected on the high quality of the applications and the strengths and reputations of the Australian and international research partners.

Professor Lu said UQ researchers were also represented in three other successful ARC Centres of Excellence applications, including another centre looking at quantum technologies.

They are:

• The ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Wall Biology (Professor Mike Gidley) – centre funded for $19.25 million;
• The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Dr Peter Holbrook) – $24.25 million; and
• The ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology (Associate Professor Tim Ralph and Professor Andrew White) – $24.5 million.

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Welcome to the presentation of the Australian Research Council Australian Laureate Fellowships for 2010.

It is always a pleasure to be here at James Cook University, and especially on an occasion like this, when I get to award prestigious fellowships to fifteen of the world’s best researchers.

Research careers

The Australian Laureate Fellowships crown our system of research stipends, which the Government has completely overhauled in the last two years.

We wanted to create viable career paths for outstanding researchers who wanted to do their work in Australia.

To that end:

* we are doubling the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards, and we have increased the award stipend by 10 per cent
* we have created 100 Super Science Fellowships for early-career researchers
* we have created 1,000 Future Fellowships for researchers in mid-career
* and we have replaced the old Federation Fellowships with these new Australian Laureate Fellowships for senior researchers.

The Labor Government’s objective in creating the Australian Laureate Fellowships is to attract and retain outstanding scholars of international reputation.

We want to create bold, dynamic teams around the very best researchers:

* to strengthen our world-class research capability
* to reinforce links between research and industry
* and to train the next generation of world leaders in research.

We believe this is the best way to produce real benefits for Australians and contribute to solving international problems, now and into the future.

The region

We have deliberately set out to internationalise our research effort. It is crucial that we keep Australia internationally competitive, and attracting researchers of international standing is one of the best ways we can do that.

That’s why these fellowships are so important.

The recipients will not only lead us to groundbreaking discoveries during their tenure as fellows.

Their exemplary mentoring skills will also give a younger generation of researchers the foundation they need to go on and achieve great things in the years beyond.

James Cook University serves as a great backdrop for this event – not only because of its tropical beauty, but because it demonstrates so effectively how quality research and researchers can enrich a regional community.

The same goes for the ARC Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies, which the university administers.

Located in Townsville, the centre’s researchers lead the world in understanding and supporting coral reef conservation.

The centre’s work attracts regular attention in international media – and deserves to be much better known here at home.

The centre’s director, Professor Terry Hughes, is here today in his capacity as a member of the ARC Advisory Council, which I established in 2008 to restore independence to the Australian Research Council.

There is no question that the centre and leaders like Professor Hughes have enriched the Townsville community by attracting bright young researchers and established experts from around the world.

It is the same story here at James Cook University’s Cairns campus, which is home to outstanding scholars like Professor William Laurance, an international authority on tropical conservation, and one of this year’s Australian Laureate Fellows.

The fellowship will put Professor Laurance in an even stronger position to attract outstanding research students to Cairns.

It will create new opportunities to showcase the capabilities of this community and this university to the world.

Professor Laurance will speak to us about his research in a moment.

Female and international fellows

The other fourteen Australian Laureate Fellows are equally distinguished, even if they don’t have the advantage of living in far north Queensland.

For example, Professor Hilary Charlesworth from the Australian National University is an international leader in her field, serving as a visiting professor at institutions including the Harvard Law School; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University of Paris.

Professor Charlesworth will use her fellowship to build Australian capacity in a field of intense international interest and concern – human rights, and in particular the implementation of human rights laws.

Professor Charlesworth will also tell us more about her work in a few moments.

She is one of four female researchers to be awarded Australian Laureate Fellowships in 2010.

The others are Professors Hanna Kokko, Margaret Jolly and Lorraine Mazerolle.

All are incredibly talented researchers, and together they represent the largest cohort of women ever recognised in a round of ARC fellowships at this level.

One aim of the Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme is to attract the world’s best researchers to our shores.

It is therefore a pleasure to welcome scholars like:

* Professor Kokko from Finland
* and Professor Chris Turney from the United Kingdom, who is doing his second tour of duty in Australia.

Before we award the 2010 Australian Laureate Fellows, I would like to make special mention of Professor Margaret Sheil and her team at the ARC.

They have worked incredibly hard to deliver this and the other new fellowship schemes I mentioned at the beginning over the past two years.

Now to the fellows:

* Professor William Laurance, James Cook University
* Professor Mark Westoby, Macquarie University
* Professor Min Gu, Swinburne University
* Professor Hilary Charlesworth, Australian National University
* Professor Amnon Neeman, Australian National University
* Professor Margaret Jolly, Australian National University
* Professor Hanna Kokko, Australian National University
* Professor Paul Mulvaney, University of Melbourne
* Professor Ary Hoffmann, University of Melbourne
* Professor Chris Turney, University of New South Wales
* Professor Matthew England, University of New South Wales
* Professor Mark Bradford, University of New South Wales
* Professor Lorraine Mazerolle, University of Queensland
* Professor Bryan Gaensler, University of Sydney
* Professor Peter Goodyear, University of Sydney

The future

Congratulations to all of you.

It is essential that we go on building Australia’s capacity for invention and discovery:

* as we have by increasing the Commonwealth’s investment in research and innovation by 34 per cent since 2007
* as we will at the new Cairns Institute for tropical education, research and innovation – which I will be receiving an update on later today
* and as we are with these fellowships.

It will be great to see what your work can teach us.

We still have so much to learn.

Astronomer Professor Bryan Gaensler, based within the School of Physics and Professor Peter Goodyear from the Faculty of Education and Social Work are among 15 researchers to be awarded a fellowship under the Australian Laureate Fellowship Scheme.

The scheme is designed to support excellence in research by attracting world-class researchers and research leaders to key positions and creating new rewards and incentives for the application of their talents in Australia.

Professor Gaensler will use his fellowship grant to help demonstrate the viability of technologies that could be used in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), the world’s most powerful radio-telescope.

His project proposes to dramatically improve our understanding of the nature and origin of magnetic fields using the unique capabilities of the ASKAP. With the resulting data, Professor Gaensler aims to transform our understanding of magnetic fields in galaxies, clusters and in diffuse intergalactic gas and thus be able to address key unanswered questions on Milky Way ecology, galaxy evolution and cosmology.

Professor Gaensler has received many awards for his research including the Young Australian of the Year, an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize awarded by the American Astronomical Society. He was named a 2008 Young Tall Poppy by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

Professor Peter Goodyear will focus on strengthening the University’s Centre for Research in Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo) with seven additional positions. His fellowship is the first to be awarded to a researcher working in the field of education.

CoCo was created in 2004 as a focus for the University’s research in learning technology and the learning sciences. It is located in the Faculty of Education and Social Work and supports cross-disciplinary collaborations with teams in IT, Engineering and Science.

According to Professor Goodyear, this investment will accelerate work on the analysis and design of complex learning environments.

“CoCo has a reputation for cutting edge research on educational design and we attract academic visitors and PhD students from around the world,” he said.

“Funding from ARC will also help us firm up our links with other leading research groups in the Asia Pacific region.”

Professor Morris, from Sydney Medical School’s School of Medical Sciences and Bosch Institute will receive his prize at a ceremony in Washington DC in October, where he will deliver the Dahl Lecture for 2010.

Professor Morris says he “ecstatic” to win the award, adding, “I guess you could say this is like the Nobel Prize for hypertension research.

“I have been doing research on this for 40 years and I was even present at the 1975 awards ceremony when Lewis Dahl [after whom the award was named] was the winner of the equivalent top award back then.”

Professor Morris has been recognised for his major breakthroughs in the field of hypertension, which include: the discovery of prorenin; elucidating renin’s biosynthetic pathway; the cloning the human renin gene and working out how it is controlled; pioneering the molecular genetics of hypertension field; discovering gene expression signatures for hypertension; and various other research firsts.

Over his 40-year career, 32 of which he has spent at the University of Sydney, Professor Morris has unravelled key molecular and genetic aspects of this serious medical condition.

“Finding the underlying molecular component of the disease is very exciting and identifying a gene’s involvement and getting all the basic knowledge on mechanisms will take us a long way to finding a cure.”

High blood pressure is the world’s biggest killer, because it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. It affects one-in-three adults.

“It’s called the silent killer,” says Professor Morris. “A person could be a walking time bomb, not knowing they have high blood pressure.”

University of Melbourne academics Professor Ary Hoffmann and Professor Paul Mulvaney were among 15 of Australia’s best researchers that were awarded the Fellowships worth around $3.1 million each.

The Fellowships are designed to support team-based research tackling urgent and complex issues. Each Fellow will lead a team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers in a project delivering significant benefits to Australia and the wider world.

Professor Hoffmann is an international authority on environmental stress monitoring, controlling pests and predicting how species will respond to climate change. His group’s project, based at the Bio21 Institute, will
focus on maintaining environmental health under the combined stresses of climate change and human population pressures.

“The Fellowship will help us to develop guidelines for sustainable agricultural production as well as biodiversity protection in threatened environments like the Australian Alps and freshwater ecosystems.”

He says insects and other invertebrates perform essential services like pollination, pest control and soil turnover, and provide food for wildlife.

“These services are under threat, and ways of maintaining them and protecting biodiversity need to be developed.”

“In order to safeguard environmental services, we will identify the genetic and evolutionary mechanisms that insects use to deal with environmental changes and the processes that promote evolutionary resilience,” he says.

Professor Mulvaney from the School of Chemistry and Bio21 Institute, and co-director of the University’s Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, is world-renowned for his work in nanotechnology.

Professor Mulvaney and his group will explore the practical limits for plasmonics: the manipulation of light using metal nanostructures. In particular, the expected outcomes include the optical detection of
single electrons, the detection and monitoring of chemical reactions one molecule at a time, and demonstration of light-driven logic gates.

Plasmonic systems will enable scientists to observe chemical reactions at the single molecule level, which will open up important applications in biosensing and environmental monitoring, says Professor Mulvaney.

“This ARC Fellowship will ensure Australia is at the forefront of one of the most exciting new fields of nanotechnology.”

Professor Peter Rathjen, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne says the fellowships acknowledge the outstanding quality of Professor Hoffmann and Professor Mulvaney’s research programs and their contribution to the store of human knowledge.

“We are privileged to have such high-quality researchers at the University whose work will deliver substantial benefits to society.”

More Information:
Professor Ary Hoffmann T: 03 8344 2282, M: 0408 342 834, E: ary@unimelb.edu.au ; Professor Paul Mulvaney, T: 83442420 M: 0466 150 963 E: mulvaney@unimelb.edu.au; Sally Sherwen, Media Office M: 0412 230 863, E: sherwens@unimelb.edu.au