Welcome to Science Hub Australia.  We’re launching with some great stories we hope you’ll enjoy.

With Nobel Laureates Professors Peter Doherty and Barry Marshall, we talk about sustainability, Australia’s future and the untapped resources of the scientific workforce.  With Dr Beth Fulton, Life Scientist of the Year 2007, we look at big picture science, and her best advice for mentoring young scientists.

We start our series on the ARC granting scheme with Professor Peter Koopman from UQ – a former ARC College of Experts member – and we’ve got two bright young Australian scientists, Drs Karen Roberts and Erich Fitzgerald, reporting from Washington about life post-PhD.  Dr John Long from Museum Victoria talks to us about writing science for the public and Dr Stuart Barber from the University of Melbourne writes about life as an academic.  Dr Betty Meggers, a scientist whose career has spanned more than 70 years, features as one of our Significant Women of Science.

As Australia emerges from the global financial crisis, we’ve also got a focus on money and an exclusive interview with Scott Pape, the Barefoot Investor, who has advice for young people who take the big, brave step of investing in themselves and their education.

We’re very proud to announce the first of our long-term community initiatives.  As many of you are aware, the 2009-10 Australian budget allowed for increasing PhD stipends 10% from last year’s rates.  At Science Hub, we don’t think that’s nearly good enough and in the coming months, we’ll be pulling together all of you who agree with us and lobbying Senator Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research to consider more substantial increases for next year.  Sign up

We’d love to hear from you and welcome your comments about our content, and what you’d like to hear about in coming months.  Vote for your favourite science story of the month, and keep in touch by signing up for our Free Weekly News, RSS feed or Twitter Feed.  From now until the end of the year, each of our monthly issues is free – completely free! So enjoy all our articles, and tell your friends and colleagues to stop by and visit if there’s something to interest them.

We’ll wrap up with Professor Koopman’s advice to young scientists:

“…take the opportunity to talk to as many leaders as possible about where they are and how they got there, what works and what doesn’t work.  If you talk to a number of people, you’ll figure out what might work for you.”

And here at Science Hub, we’d like to help you figure out what might work for you too.  We’re bringing together Australia’s scientists – to share your wisdom, be inspired and to make science matter again.

Until next month,

The Team at Science Hub Australia.