What's On at UWA

A public lecture by Ian Chubb, Chief Scientist of Australia.

In this inaugural Rio Tinto-UWA Education Partnership lecture, Professor Ian Chubb will discuss the importance of science to Australia’s future and its place in the world.

Professor Ian Chubb was appointed to the position of Chief Scientist on 19 April 2011 and commenced the role on 23 May 2011.

This lecture is sponsored by Rio Tinto, the Faculty of Science and the Institute of Advanced Studies at The University of Western Australia.

Cost: Free, but bookings essential. This event is now FULL.

By way of introduction I will review the legacy of the last 100 years of "progress. Anthropogenic emissions have triggering new carbon emission loops. destruction of habitats is leading to species instabilities with potential impacts on food production, globalization & increasing wealth inequality is leading to economic instabilities, changing food to a commodity is leading to mental and physical health issues and the massive increase in our capacity to destroy has shrunk the time scales of destruction to much less that the time scales required for healing. So what are we to do? I shall explore 10 simple suggestions: 1. Re-establish continuity between generations 2. Seek harmony rather than conflict 3. Learn to how live on a finite planet 4. Re-establish food as part of life 5. Introduce carbon/water neutral living 6. Curb wealth inequity 7. Foster mental and physical well being; curb advertising 8. Subdue technology, re-introduce "Creative Loafing" 9. Foster local diversity of job opportunity 10. Preserve the sources of cultural diversity

Jorg Imberger is the Chairman of the Centre for Water Research and The University’s Professor of Environmental Engineering. Jorg is a winner of two prestigious international awards; the Onassis Prize in the category “Man and the Environment” and the Stockholm Water Prize. Jorg’s expertise has also been recognised in a considerable range of Australian research awards. Jorg established the Centre for Water Research in 1982. Prior to the Centre’s foundation Jorg held a Gledden Fellowship and a Science Fellowship at the University of California. Jorg’s initial objective in establishing the Centre for Water Research was to assess the impact of pollution in the world’s water bodies. The Centre has achieved this major objective through the development of a world leading range of specialised instrumentation. The Centre’s operations now combine three major research objectives: understanding and managing the environment; the development, evaluation and commercialisation of scientific instruments; and support for the water and coastal engineering industries. The combination of these spheres of activity has enabled the Centre to have a worldwide impact.

Current archaeology staff members will give interesting and entertaining insights into their research projects in Australia and around the world. As a special guest and expert in space archaeology, Dr Alice Gorman (Australian Cultural Heritage Management and Flinders University) will take visitors beyond earth itself on an archaeological journey to the edge of the solar system.

Applications to Rotary Clubs close on 31 May for 2014 program for current year 11 students. Go to the NYSF website for details.

The National Youth Science Forum is a two weeks in January program of events for students about to enter Year 12 and who are considering going on to a tertiary education in the sciences. The Forum is run in three sessions: two in Canberra and one in Perth.

Selection of participants for the Forum is coordinated by Rotary International and is undertaken by Rotarians, members of the scientific community including teachers, and former NYSF students. Selection is competitive, so the students that attend NYSF are some of the brightest young minds in the country.

The Forum aims to expose the students not only to the different career options in the sciences, but also to the choices of tertiary institutions they can attend to obtain the degree that enables them to embark on their new career.

Talk#1 Sensory Trap: Communication and collaboration with honeybees in the ultraviolet

During this talk Adelaide Cohalan will present ideas that she has been working on as part of her proposal for her final year Masters project, Sensory Trap. Sensory Trap intends to explore the subjective colour perception of the honeybee in comparison to the human by attempting to communicate with honeybee workers through ultraviolet paintings. By overlaying several different perceptual filters, she aims to investigate the complexities of perception and deception in communication between human and non-human animals. Overall this project intends to contribute to a body of work that aims to redefine our relationship with our environment and with non-human animals by turning away from an anthropocentric view of the world. This project will be carried out in collaboration with the Centre for Integrated Bee Research at the University of WA.

Adelaide Cohalan is currently undertaking the Master of Biological Arts degree with SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. She has previously completed a Bachelor of Science (majoring in Zoology) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (majoring in Painting) at James Cook University in Townsville, North Queensland.

Talk#2 The increasing role of hobbyist and urban beekeepers in the maintenance of honeybee populations.

In the past seven years more than a billion honeybees have died as a result of Colony Collapse Disorder. The health of the honeybee was previously the interest entomologists, evolutionary biologists and beekeepers, but the recent collapse of colonies has created widespread concern. Artists, designers, engineers, filmmakers, popular media and policy makers are increasingly recognizing the role of the honeybees within an ecological, social and cultural context. As a result of this growing awareness, the traditional model of maintaining colonies is changing. Hobbyist and urban beekeeping has dramatically increased in developed countries around the world and offers an alternative model of colony maintenance. Rooftop apiaries are an increasingly popular in cities like London, Melbourne, New York City and Paris. In Switzerland, hobbyists maintain the majority of honeybee populations.

This talk examines the existing model of honeybee maintenance – one in which a small number of beekeepers maintain the majority of hives – and looks at a potential alternative in which a large number of hobbyists and urban apiarists maintain a small number of hives. This model is termed 'crowdkeeping' and takes its cues from Switzerland's success with hobbyist beekeeping. The presentation will also look at potential needs and requirements for hobbyists and urban apiarists. The materials and forms of urban apiaries need not adhere to the traditions of industrial beekeeping. New hive designs have the potential to increase human engagement with bees and emerging technologies such as 3D-printing may assist in the production of hives that fulfill the requirements of hobbyists and urban apiarists.

Devon Ward is a designer, interdisciplinary researcher and a prospective master of biological art at SymbioticA within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. He is a graphic designer for the Centre for Integrated Bee Research (CIBER) and a member of the Australian Graphic Design Association. He obtained his bachelor's of fine arts from the University of Florida and has previously worked as a print and web designer. His current research investigates the interface between technology and biology.

SPICE Events are designed to expose high school science teachers to exciting new science by increasing interaction between teachers and researchers at UWA. They provide the opportunity for teachers to engage in current research and learn new ideas for the classroom, and usually contain a range of activities including hands-on lab sessions, field trips or presentations showcasing cutting-edge research. We expect the heightened engagement and interaction between teachers and tertiary scientists to have a significant impact upon the enthusiasm of teachers for science.

See website for dates and further details.

The Agency in Movement symposium employs a variety of disciplines to explore the complex relations between movement and vitality. Motion is observed by attaching a frame of reference to a “body” and measuring its change in position relative to another reference frame. Therefore, movement is relative, means ever changing and is perceived as visceral and “alive”. The Symposium will include invited speakers from diverse disciplines (art, performance, biology, biophysics, biomechanics, and philosophy) who will explore and interrogate the conceptual and technical relations between life (biological or artificial), movement and perceptions of "vitality”, with the hope that some interesting meeting points and/or negations will emerge.

The symposium stems from an Australian Research Council project exploring the use of skeletal muscle tissue which is grown, stimulated and activated in a techno-scientific surrogate “body”. This moving twitching (semi) living material evokes, makes unease, and asks, in sensorial and theoretical means about issues of aliveness and agency. The project is concerned with onto-ethico-epistemological (Barad 2010) questions about life and the affect created through the phenomenon of movement.

We will be probing into the (sometimes) uneasy and undefined areas of shifting perceptions of life, heralded by developments in the life sciences and applied technologies, coupled with the introduction of engineering principles into life sciences. In the light of ‘new materialism’, ‘agential realism’ and when life is becoming a raw material to be engineered, we will examine the position and role of movement as agency.

Speakers include: Monika Bakke, a philosopher who interrogates cross species and non-human communication at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.; Andrew Pelling leads the Laboratory for Biophysical Manipulation at the University of Ottawa, which experiment with in vitro muscle cells and with artists. Elizabeth Stephens, a science historian from the Centre for the History of European Discourses. Elizabeth will analyse some historical discourses and understandings in relation to vitalism. Tony Bakker and Gavin Pinniger, Muscle Physiology, the University of Western Australia. Stuart Hodgetts, a biologist from UWA will contribute to the understanding of the neuromuscular interface. Chris Salter, the Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research, whose artistic research explore the performative, focusing on dynamic and temporal processes over static objects and representations. Jennifer Johung, will contribute her perspective on performance and agency in art (Art History, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee). Oron Catts, SymbioticA’s Director, will discuss the demonstrable in science and the arts. Gabrielle Decamous, will look at semi-living material as a device in undermining the polarized understanding of the world (Kyushu University, Japan). Miranda Grounds of UWA provide her extensive knowledge in the cell biology aspects of skeletal muscles. Ionat Zurr will explore an artistically grown and induced semi living movement which attempt to reintroduce a sense of agency. Stelarc, an Australia artist and Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmith University UK, will be reflecting on these issues in the closing panel.

The Australian Brain Bee Challenge (ABBC) motivates young people to learn about the brain – and has been created to inspire students to pursue careers in neuroscience research.

As Australia’s only neuroscience competition for high school students, the ABBC is an event that will have you expanding your hemispheres!

The Brain Bee Challenge is a test of knowledge about important facts concerning intelligence, memory, emotions, sensations, movement, stress, aging, sleep, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

SPICE Events are designed to expose high school science teachers to exciting new science by increasing interaction between teachers and researchers at UWA. They provide the opportunity for teachers to engage in current research and learn new ideas for the classroom, and usually contain a range of activities including hands-on lab sessions, field trips or presentations showcasing cutting-edge research. We expect the heightened engagement and interaction between teachers and tertiary scientists to have a significant impact upon the enthusiasm of teachers for science.

See website for dates and further details.

The residential camp is held annually in July for students from Years 9 to 11. It is held in Perth and includes visits to The University of Western Australia and other locations of scientific interest around the city.

The camp provides participants with a hands-on experience of science, engineering, medicine and technology. There is an emphasis on fields relevant to Indigenous communities in Western Australia, including sustainability, health, ecology, conservation, infrastructure, water, energy and mineral resources.

School students attending the camp will be engaged through the interweaving of cultural themes with participation from Indigenous scientists, engineers and health professionals demonstrating the relevance and importance of science and technology to Indigenous people. A careers forum and information session on selecting school subjects is held as part of the camp to encourage students to aspire towards university entrance. Current Indigenous Students will also assist as supervisors, acting as positive role models for students.

This camp is supported by Woodside and the Australian Government, Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education through the Aspire UWA Indigenous Program.

At the very same time that Bergson developed his concept of Élan Vital in his book Creative Evolution, others attempted to do away with the metaphysical notion of vital force. One significant endeavour was taken by Stephane Leduc, who set out to prove that life is merely a chemical process.

In his 1911 book The Mechanism of Life, Leduc proposed a series of chemical experiments showing the emergence of life-like phenomena of different degrees of complexity. Using seductive imagery of mainly diffusion and osmosis Leduc attempted to prove the mechanistic aspects of life and challenge Vitalism.

With the recent advent of Synthetic Biology where the engineering mindset towards biology is set to dominate approaches to life, we see a rehashing of similar stories from a hundred years ago. One such story is the creation of the basic unit of life, the cell, out of non-living materials. The so called protocells are becoming a major field of study complete with the hyperbole rhetoric about their potential applications.

This piece will reappropriate one of the simplest protocell protocols offered by Leduc, working with the diffusion of two concentrations of solutions that create transitory cell-like droplets. The droplets resemble cells with membrane and nuclei, they last for a few moments before succumbing to entropy and dissolving into a murky liquid, “much like life.”

This protocol is automated using another hyped technology: three-dimensional printing. There is much discussion about 3D printing technology as the next industrial revolution - something that parallels the assembly line of Fordism at the time Leduc was working on the Mechanism of Life. The promise of 3D printing technology is in its core based on information transfer as the business model; the focus is on the instructions/data as the currency while the materiality is merely an optional manifestation. This is problematic as at the very same time, the 3D printing industry suggests the ability to print actual life, or at least parts of the living. This very seductive scenario of printing life from scratch is played off in this work against the unstable, uncontrollable and transient nature of the protocell droplets as a material. What would capture the public imaginary? The precise movement of the machine? The perfect arrangement of the droplets? Or the off-putting murky outcome of entropy?

To a large extent this piece deals with issues of cultural amnesia and reimagining; pointing attention to the use of certain visuals and expressions to persuade, hype and then disappoint. In a time when the idea of creating synthetic life is in the forefront, it is important to culturally probe current and past approaches to the idea of the Mechanism of Life. The printed “protocells” are unstable and temporary and take on forms that appear organic and then disappear. More than a proof on the mechanism of life, they are a suggestion for a humble approach to the question of what life is and how far are we willing to make life into a raw material for our own ends.

Oron Catts is Director of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts School of Anatomy Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Catts is an artist, researcher and a curator at the forefront of the emerging field of biological-arts, whose work addresses shifting perceptions of life. Dr. Ionat Zurr is an artist, researcher and the Academic coordinator at SymbioticA. Catts together with Zurr formed the internationally renowned Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) in 1996.

The work The Mechanism of Life (after Stephane Leduc) was collaboratively created with Corrie Van Sice. Her work applies concepts of bio-mimesis to the production of fabrication methodologies, which identify the inherent potential for matter to become functional, and human curiosity’s creative influence on natural systems. Van Sice earned her Masters at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the self-proclaimed “center for the recently possible,” and worked as Materials and Processes Engineer at the popular 3d printing company, MakerBot Industries. She has partnered with synthetic biologists at Brooklyn’s citizen science lab Genspace, and began work with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr via the Finnish Bioart Society at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in the fall 2011.

The task for the 10 finalists is to give an engaging talk on their PhD topic and it's significance in language that everyone can understand - in just 3 minutes. The audience will vote for its People's Choice.

Human bodies are a mammal/fungal/bacterial/insect/viral ecology which we rarely acknowledge: a normal human body is said to be composed of over 1 trillion cells, of which only about 10% are animal. This artistic research project explores what it means to be human when we recognise our bodies as a multi-species ecology. I focus on the intimate and fraught contact zones of biology, aesthetics, culture and care between Homo sapiens and Candida albicans, the single celled opportunistic fungal pathogen commonly known as thrush. Understanding and reinterpreting physical and sensual interactions is essential to explore embodied interspecies encounters and the material effects of human/non-human boundary formation. This discussion positions humans and thrush as co-evolved companion species involved in a biopolitical entanglement that is gendered, erotic and often ruthless.

Tarsh Bates completed a Master of Science (Biological Arts) in 2012. She has worked variously as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet paper packer, a researcher in compost science and waste management, a honeybee ejaculator, an art gallery invigilator, a bookkeeper, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. Tarsh is currently a candidate for a PhD (Biological Arts) at SymbioticA UWA where her current research is concerned with gentleness, the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a multispecies ecology. She is particularly enamoured with Candida albicans.

SPICE Events are designed to expose high school science teachers to exciting new science by increasing interaction between teachers and researchers at UWA. They provide the opportunity for teachers to engage in current research and learn new ideas for the classroom, and usually contain a range of activities including hands-on lab sessions, field trips or presentations showcasing cutting-edge research. We expect the heightened engagement and interaction between teachers and tertiary scientists to have a significant impact upon the enthusiasm of teachers for science.

See website for dates and further details.

The De Laeter Youth Lecture is organized annually by the WA Branch of the Australian Institute of Physics. It is named in honour of the late Emeritus Professor John De Laeter. Not only was Professor De Laeter one of Western Australia's most noted scientists, but he also had an enormous impact on education is Western Australia. A minor planet was named after Professor De Laeter in recognition of his research in astrophysics and, in 1992, he was awarded the Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his contributions to science, education and industry. He received a Eureka Prize in 2005, and a Clunies Ross Science and Technology Award in 2006.

The Great Southern Science Council, the Western Australian Chief Scientist, the WA Museum (Albany), and the Centre of Excellence in Natural Resource Management are hosting a conference in Albany to showcase the excellent science taking place in the Great Southern region.

'Great Southern, Great Science' will include presentations on nationally significant work that impacts on the Great Southern, and local research and development by scientists and professionals in the Great Southern.

The conference will be held Thursday 8 August at the Albany Entertainment Centre from 9am to 3.30pm.

Program available online https://www.cenrm.uwa.edu.au/community/conference

Buy tickets online https://payments.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/cenrm/gsgss_registration

National Science Week is an annual celebration of science in Australia, an opportunity to join together to enjoy and explore the wonders and benefits of science. The Faculty of Science at The University of Western Australia will be hosting a number of special events for schools and for the community.

The Chanelle Carter Memorial Fund, sponsored by Alcoa Australia, was established at The University of Western Australia in 2011. Chanelle was a UWA chemistry graduate who worked at Alcoa Australia. Her life was tragically cut short in 2010. Alcoa Australia established the Chanelle Carter Memorial Fund to honour her zest, energy and passion. Chanelle’s parents, Yve and Mike Carter in particular were very keen that the fund was used to support young women in science. They wanted their daughter’s memorial to potentially make a difference. The Chanelle Carter Memorial Fund therefore offers six Year 10 girls from South West schools the opportunity to visit and participate in a range of science-focused activities at The University of Western Australia.

In 2011, the inaugural year of the fund, the project was coordinated by Associate Professor Jan Dook and Charmaine White from the SPICE project and Dr Joanne Castelli from the LPS faculty office. Three Year 10 girls from Newton Moore SHS and three from Pinjarra SHS, together with accompanying teachers were invited to be guests of the Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences at The University of Western Australia, from Sunday 14 August to Thursday 18 August. These dates encompassed the UWA Expo and National Science Week. Teachers were able to attend SPICE PD sessions during the visit.

In 2013, visits to UWA will be from 11 to 15 August. Further details will be available shortly.

Come and find out about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, career options, scholarship opportunities, our valuable research, community programs and facilities.

There's also residential college tours, hands-on activities, live music, entertainment, and plenty of fun activities for the whole family as we celebrate our 100th birthday.