What's On at UWA

The Graduate School of Education invites you to participate in this inaugural Seminar Series.

With a focus on sharing personal insights into timely and relevant topics in education research, these seminars will engage participants in a lively discussion of some of the pressing issues affecting Australia’s academics, schools and society today.

Speakers and topics for 2012

15 August

Winthrop Professor Grady Venville

“Choosing science comes more from the heart than from the brain (or the pocket)”: A retrospective study of why scientists chose to study science.”

26 September

Winthrop Professor Stephen Houghton

“Are the seeds of antisociality and psychopathic traits sown early in life?”

10 October

Winthrop Professor and Chapple Chair David Andrich

“Sliding Doors in Academe: Idiosyncrasies of autobiography and controversy in psychometrics”

31 October

Winthrop Professor and Faculty Dean Helen Wildy

“NAPLAN Data: Improving student learning OR doing the work of the Devil?”

14 November

Winthrop Professor Thomas O’Donoghue

The primary school’s invasion of the privacy of the child: Unmasking the potential of some current practices

Venue Details

RSVP to Ms. Alyce Green, Administrative Assistant, GSE [email protected]

Abstracts and additional details will be distributed closer to the event date.

The ‘science pipeline’ in Australia is under threat because not enough budding scientists are moving through from school to university to science-based jobs. The aim of this research was to retrospectively survey current Australian and New Zealand scientists to ascertain why they chose to study science. The quantitative data from 722 respondents showed that, unsurprisingly, the main reasons were that they were interested in science and they were good at science. Secondary school science classes and one particular science teacher also were found to be important factors. Of more interest are their anecdotes about the challenges of becoming a scientist, some of which will be shared in this presentation.

Each year the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research hosts a Prospective Postgraduate Student Evening to inform potential students about the postgraduate opportunities available at the Institute, the School of Paediatrics and Child Health and Princess Margaret Hospital.

If you are interested in any of the 2013 projects http://www.childhealthresearch.org.au/study-with-us/become-a-student.aspx, we suggest you attend the prospective student evening or contact the relevant researcher indicated in the booklet. The listed projects are a guide only and not a definitive list.

Tom Ratajczak received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Western Australia in 1972 and joined Roland Hähnel as Saw Medical Research Fellow in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, where he established an affinity chromatography-based method to isolate the intact estrogen receptor-Hsp90 complex. In 1989-90 he pursued further postdoctoral studies with Gordon Ringold, Institute of Cancer & Developmental Biology, Syntex Research, Palo Alto, California and after returning to Perth in 1991 joined the Department of Endocrinology & Diabetes, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital where he is now Senior Medical Scientist in Charge. He holds a Lab Head position in the Centre for Medical Research, Western Australian Institute for Medical Research, UWA. His group is credited with the discovery of cyclophilin 40, a cyclosporin A-binding cochaperone associated with the estrogen receptor. In addition to his major research focus on the role of Hsp90 molecular chaperone machinery in steroid receptor function, he has special interests in the role of sequestosome 1/p62 in Paget’s disease of bone and in calcium-sensing receptor genetics in parathyroid dysfunction.

A public lecture by Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies, New York University.

Climate change presents us with problems of utmost complexity. In particular, climate change poses the largest-scale and most difficult collective action problem that humanity has ever faced. Considerations ranging from our biological nature to facts about our political institutions all bear on the explanation of why we have failed to act.In the face of such problems, two broad families of considerations are sometimes effective in motivating action. Economics can sometimes succeed in showing that particular solutions appeal to our interests. Ethics can sometimes show that particular responses accord with our moral ideals. Economics is severely limited in demonstrating that aggressive responses to climate change are in our interests because it is permeated with ethical considerations. Our hope for motivating action on climate change must therefore to a great extent turn on ethical concerns.

In this lecture Dr Jamieson will explain why this hope largely has been disappointed. Just as the problems of climate change overwhelm our cognitive and affective systems, and our ability to do reliable economic calculations, so they also swamp the machinery of morality, at least as it currently manifests in our moral consciousness.

The choice we face is whether to remain complacent in the face climate change, or undertake the challenge of revising our morality.

Cost: Free, RSVP your attendance to [email protected] .

This lecture is a part of the Institute of Advanced Studies 2012 lecture series ‘Global Transformation and Public Ethics’. This series of free public lectures aims to stimulate considered debate about urgent issues in public ethics and policy as well as reflecting on ways we can improve public discourse about such issues.

Unfortunately this event has been cancelled.



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In flowering plants, mitochondrial transcriptomes contain some 300–500 RNA editing sites and chloroplast transcriptomes approximately 30 editing sites. In lycophytes, RNA editing is particularly abundant with more than 2100 editing sites in mitochondrial mRNAs and rRNAs of the spikemoss Selaginella moellendorffii. In contrast, only 11 sites are identified in mitochondria of the model plant Physcomitrella patens, making this moss an attractive model for functional studies. Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins with unique carboxyterminal extensions (E/DYW) encoded by extended nuclear gene families in plants have previously been characterized as specificity factors recognizing editing sites. PPR proteins with the DYW domain in particular were shown to perfectly correlate with the presence of RNA editing in evolution. Our DYW-PPR gene knockout studies in Physcomitrella will contribute to identify the full set of nuclear specificity factors addressing all editing sites in a plant mitochondrial transcriptome. Most surprisingly, we recently also identified DYW-type PPR proteins in the heterolobosean protist Naegleria gruberi. Interestingly, we were now able to identify C-to-U editing in the mitochondrial transcriptome of this protist, which is phylogenetically separated from the plant lineage by more than 1 billion years of evolution.

Understanding how the physical, chemical and biological attributes of the ocean interact is important because it provides a way to forecast fisheries productivity and the ecosystem effects of climate change. Yet, obtaining high-resolution and accurate taxonomic data on microscopic plankton species over large spatial scales remains a challenge. In this seminar I will illustrate how we are combining DNA analysis of mixed zooplankton samples with particle tracking modelling to map the distribution of the eggs and larvae of dhufish (Glaucosoma hebraicum) in real time. Our approach provides unprecedented efficiency and sensitivity in sample processing, and has the potential to provide new insight into the recruitment dynamics of this at-risk species. I will also discuss how this approach can be extended to simultaneously mapping entire fish and other plankton assemblages at high taxonomic resolution, and to providing species-specific estimates of plankton biomass.

A public lecture by Sally Young, Associate Professor and Reader, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

For those who work in the news media, power is usually viewed as something that happens outside of the walls of their media organisation. “We scrutinise power,” journalists and news media organisations frequently proclaim, but there is a strange failure to recognise that the media, as a collective, are just as influential (and arguably, much more so) than the hundreds of individual politicians sitting in parliaments across Australia. And, while politicians are elected, regularly scrutinised by journalists (and others) and held to account at the ballot box at elections, none of these mechanisms apply to media organisations or to their reporters.

In Australia today, we know quite a lot about politicians and how they govern but we still know worryingly little about the media and how they operate. In this lecture, Dr Young will argue that this is an urgent problem and that, of all the much-lamented problems with media reporting, the biggest is that the media do a poor job of scrutinising and reporting on their own role. She will look at this in terms of an interesting paradox. How is it that news journalism in Australia is said to currently be in ‘crisis’ - with declining revenues/ratings, job losses and a broken business model – yet, as a collective, the Australian media remain so powerful?

Cost: This is a free public lecture, RSVP to [email protected].

This talk will explore the varied, surprising, and persistent afterlife of the Middle Ages in Australian culture. As the late eighteenth century was the foundational period of British settlement in the Australian colonies, High Enlightenment ideals have had an indisputable impact on Australian public life. Yet the story is not so simple. A growing recognition of the greater complexity of colonial Australia’s relationship with the European past has led to a more nuanced account of its distinctive engagement with a cultural legacy stretching back to the medieval period. A picture is now emerging of a colonial culture in which medievalism — the creative modern response to the Middle Ages and adaptation of medieval concepts — has existed as a major aesthetic and cultural presence in Australian literature, architecture, political ceremony, theatre,art, and even sport. This thriving but often unacknowledged subculture, with its preoccupations with either romance and chivalry and folklore, or irrationality, disorder, and Gothic gloom, has been far more formative of settler Australia’s cultural identity than has been recognized. Looking at examples from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this talk will explore just some of the large body of medievalism Australia has produced, and will discuss some of the ways we can understand its highly localized interpretations of medieval motifs, narrative forms, legends, and personages.

The conference explores cultural appropriations in, by and of the medieval and early modern world, across a range of disciplines. The three main sub-themes are: 1. the appropriation of earlier cultures by the medieval or early modern world; 2. cultural exchanges and frontier encounters within the medieval and early modern world; and 3. the reception or appropriation of the medieval or early modern by later periods. Those interested can register online at http://www.pmrg.arts.uwa.edu.au/2012_conference or pay at the door.

"The Catholic Church and the Union"

Professor Oliver Rafferty SJ, the 2012 St Thomas More College Chair of Jesuit Studies, will present the second in a series of six lectures on nineteenth century Irish history.

The Chair of Jesuit Studies is jointly recognised by the the University of Western Australia and the University of Notre Dame Australia, and aims to bring a leading academic from the worldwide Jesuit community to Perth each year.

Professor Rafferty is visiting from Heythrop College, University of London, where he specialises in Irish and Ecclesiastical history. He will present the remaining four seminars in the same locations, and at the same time, on Friday 24th August, and Fridays 7th, 14th, and 21st September.

Do you have difficulty recognising faces? Interested in participating in research to find out more?

Register at: https://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/research/projects/prosopagnosia/register/ or email [email protected] for more information.

Around 2% of people find it difficult to recognize people via the face and instead rely on other cues such as clothing, hairstyle or voice.

People with face blindness (or prosopagnosia) often find it difficult to recognise the faces of family, friends, and work colleagues. People also report that watching movies and TV can be tedious because it is hard to differentiate between characters who look similar.

Ethics Approval RA/4/1/5405

For the past 30 years, Geoffrey Lancaster has been at the forefront of the historically informed performance practice movement. Associate Professor Lancaster has appeared as conductor or soloist with all the Symphony Australia orchestras and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The presentation is concerned with alternative ways to achieve equality policy objectives - drawing upon unrelated areas such as dietary health or workplace health and safety. It is based on current inter-disciplinary work with the UK Government to generate practical insights to inform policy and institutional design. It begins by assessing how well - and why - interventions work to mitigate public harm or detriment in other unrelated spheres (such as public health, food safety, professional standards and financial regulation). Citing the public interest, government and regulatory agencies are able to utilise such knowledge to deliver safer homes, more punctual pupils, healthier diets, cleaner streets, and so on. It then looks at how far attitudinal change and behavioural change are interconnected, and specifically the degree to which attitudinal change serves as a pre-requisite to behavioural change. For instance, securing a legal framework that creates minimum standards of fire safety in workplaces or homes may be influenced by public attitudes but is certainly not dependent on such settled public attitudes to start with. Indeed, legislation, and what this requires of employers and households in practice, can have a demonstration effect, normalising behavioural change in the process. And attitudinal change alone is unlikely to drive behavioural change and may be unwanted or unnecessary in any case, particularly where the potential citizen detriment is hard to spot by individuals themselves. Finally, it considers the implications for policymaking in three regards: first, optimally blending incentives and sanctions to sustain behavioural change relevant to equalities outcomes; second, mapping relationships between background factors that indirectly shape decision-making and choices and foreground factors that can be influenced through policy; and third, targeting policy instruments at hard-to-move individuals, groups and interests.

The Seminar: We have previously reported that treatment with magnesium following global and focal cerebral ischaemia does not reduce brain damage in normothermic rats (1, 2). However we have shown that mild hypothermia (35°C) combined with magnesium is more effective than either treatment used alone following global and focal ischaemia (3). Treatment is effective when commenced 2 hours post global ischaemia and when commenced 2 or 4, but not 6 hours post-permanent focal ischaemia (4). We are currently further defining therapeutic windows following global ischaemia and transient focal ischaemia.

The Speaker: Bruno Meloni obtained his Bachelor of Science degree at Curtin University in 1985 and his PhD degree at Murdoch University in 1993. In 1996, he started a second Postdoctoral position with the newly formed Stroke Research Group, situated at the ANRI and headed by Clinical Professor Neville Knuckey. A/Prof Meloni was responsible for setting up the molecular biology, in vitro cultivation and animal surgery laboratories and has played a major role in overseeing its direction over the last 15 years. A/Prof Meloni's research has focussed on identifying neuroprotective proteins for the development of potential treatments for ischaemic brain injury and assessing the effectiveness of mild hypothermia and magnesium as a neuroprotective therapy following cerebral ischaemia. To this end, his talk will focus on experimental work performed by the Stroke Research Group over the last several years characterising the efficacy of mild hypothermia and magnesium in stroke and global cerebral ischaemia rat models.

Groups and Combinatorics Seminar

Pablo Spiga (University of Milano-Bicocca)

will speak on

Compositions of n and an application to the covering number of the symmetric groups

at 1pm in MLR2 on Tuesday 21st of August

Abstract: Given a positive integer n, a k-composition of n is an ordered sequence of k positive integers summing up to n. In this short talk, we are interested on the number of k-compositions satisfying some "coprimeness" condition. As an application we give a Classification-free proof of some results on the covering number of the symmetric group.

All welcome

Unfortunately this event has been cancelled.

Lecture not longer taking place

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Dr Penelope Woods, ARC Centre of Excellence for History of Emotions, The University of Western Australia. Musical Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage.

A public lecture by David Konstan, Professor of Classics, New York University and visiting UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Professor-at-Large.

There is a deep problem with beauty. Beauty is commonly equated with sexual attractiveness. Yet there is also the beauty of art, which arouses an aesthetic response of disinterested contemplation.

As Roger Scruton writes in his recent book, Beauty (2009): “In the realm of art beauty is an object of contemplation, not desire.”

Are there, then, two kinds of beauty? By looking back the classical Greek conception of beauty, we may see how it gave rise to the modern dilemma, and some possible ways of resolving it.

This lecture is presented by the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

This event is sold out.

The next Soil&Water Seminar speaker will be Assistant Prof. Natasha Pauli from SEE(UWA), at 12pm on Weds Aug 22. All welcome!

TITLE: “Local knowledge and use of soil biota in agriculture”

ABSTRACT: Efforts to increase above- and below-ground biodiversity in farming systems require greater understanding of how farmers develop and use their knowledge of biodiversity, ecological processes and soil quality. While much has been written about local knowledge of soil type and soil quality, there has been relatively little research on farmers’ knowledge and perceptions of soil biota, particularly with respect to their influence on soil health and agricultural management practices.

This presentation will outline a meta-analysis of existing research on local knowledge of soil biota, describing geographic trends and key findings. The presentation will also discuss a case study example, using the results of semi-structured interviews on local knowledge of soils, vegetation and soil fauna with 20 smallholder farmers from rural Honduras. The combination of the farmers’ shared experiences and information imparted from external sources has led to the development of a substantial body of local ecological knowledge regarding the attributes and management of biological resources within the agricultural system. For the farmers interviewed, knowledge of the relationships between soil quality and biological processes was more detailed for above-ground biodiversity than for below-ground biodiversity. The findings of the research have implications for the development of policies and/or programmes aimed at promoting the benefits of greater below-ground biodiversity in farming systems.