What's On at UWA

The Postgraduate and Honours Expo showcases a host of opportunities for further study, including honours and postgraduate coursework and research possibilities.

Discover the courses each faculty has to offer, learn about postgraduate scholarships, attend information sessions and talk to staff, honours and postgraduate students.

For more information about the Expo along with details on the presentations being held throughout the evening please go uwa.edu.au/postgradexpo

Nahid Afrose Kabir has recently taken up a position of Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia. Currently, Dr Kabir is an honorary senior fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. In this lecture, Dr. Kabir will talk about her book “Young British Muslims: Identity, Culture, Politics and the Media.”

In Britain’s highly politicised social climate in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings, “Young British Muslims…” provides an in-depth understanding of British Muslim Identity through the following social constructs: migration history, family settlement, socio-economic status, religion and culture, and the wider societal environment.

Dr. Kabir was a visiting fellow (Aug. 2009 – July 2011) in Islam in the West program at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, USA. Her current research project is titled, “An Understanding of the Identity of Muslim Youths and Young Adults in the United States of America.” Nahid Kabir is also the author of Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History (London: Routledge 2005).

Analysis of Medical Expenditures with Semiparametric Panel Data Models

The UWA Music Students' Society presents it's 3rd concert of the Semester. This concert will showcase works composed by students and performed by UWA Music Students.

The 2011 Manning Clark House Day of Ideas has invited a range of speakers to discuss how the population dynamics predicted by mid-century will affect how we live. There will be ample opportunity for discussion and the raising and sharing of ideas.

Speakers:

*Population Trends - Dr Tom Wilson, Senior Research Fellow, Queensland Centre for Population Research. *Social Capital and Sense of Community - Associate Professor Lisa Wood, Deputy Director, Centre for Built Environment, UWA. *Urban Spaces - Professor Shane Murray, Dean, Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University. *Rural Demography and Social Dynamics - Winthrop Professor Matthew Tonts, Head, School of Earth and the Environment, UWA. *Environmental Sustainability and Population Growth - Chuck Berger, Director of Strategic Ideas, Australian Conservation Foundation, Melbourne.

Registration Cost: $70 standard | $55 concession

Adj. Assoc. Prof. Mohammed Benghezal will give a talk on surface properties of urease and persistence of H. pylori in the Microbiology & Immunology Discipline Seminar room, Friday, 7 October 2011 at 9:00am. Helicobacter pylori enzyme urease facilitates gastric colonisation by neutralising the acidic pH. A number of in vitro studies have demonstrated urease-dependent activation of monocytes, macrophages and epithelial cells resulting in cytokine and chemokine production and recruitment of inflammatory cells, suggesting an immune modulation role of urease in vitro. A structure-based insertion mutagenesis analysis of the urease complex performed in our laboratory identified a discrete region on the enzyme surface that is needed for persistence of H. pylori in a mouse model of infection. This result confirms a non-enzymatic role of urease in establishing chronic infection. The abundance of urease (10% of the cell weight) and the fact that it is secreted in the extracellular medium support the idea that the surface of the urease interacts directly with host components important for the host-pathogen interaction and immune modulation enabling bacterial persistence.

Groups and Combinatorics Seminar

Akos Seress (UWA)

will speak

On the diameter of permutation groups

at 1pm Friday 7th of October in MLR2

Abstract: Joint work with H. Helfgott. Given a finite group G and a set A of generators, the diameter diam(Gamma(G,A)) of the Cayley graph Gamma(G,A) is the smallest number x such that every element of G can be expressed as a word of length at most x in A and the inverse of A. We are concerned with the diameter under the worst-case generators: diam(G):= max(diam(Gamma(G,A))).

It has long been conjectured that the diameter of the symmetric group of degree n is polynomially bounded in n, but the best previously known upper bound was exponential in the square root of n (Babai, Seress, 1988). We give a quasipolynomial upper bound for diam(Sym(n)). The same bound applies to the alternating groups.

This addresses a key open case of Babai's conjecture that the diameter of all nonabelian finite simple groups G is bounded by a polylogarithmic function of the group order. The first class of groups for which the conjecture was verified was PSL(2,p), p prime (Helfgott, 2008). This has been generalised to all simple groups of Lie type of bounded rank (Pyber, Szabo, 2011 and Breuillard, Green, Tao, 2011); the unbounded-rank cases are likely to raise combinatorial problems of the type studied in this paper.

By a theorem of Babai, Seress (1992), our result implies a quasipolynomial upper bound on the diameter of all transitive permutation groups of degree n.

Our approach combines ideas on growth in groups (as in (Helfgott, 2008), (Helfgott, 2011)) with an adaptation of older techniques on permutation groups -- most notably (Babai, 1982) and (Pyber, 1993) -- to sets of permutations.

In this seminar, theories of agency, embodiment and constructions of the maternal body will be examined. Since fieldwork for this PhD project is scheduled to commence in April 2012, the ethnographic data presented in this seminar will be limited. Almost 15% of Indonesian households are unofficially headed by women. These are some of Indonesia’s poorest households, where maternal mortality rates are highest. In Southeast Sulawesi, bridewealth in its varying forms and amounts affects not only agency, but also how the uses and meanings of women’s bodies are understood. This presentation will focus on beliefs about the maternal body, the effects of bridewealth on gendered power relations, and the social contexts within which various forms of women’s agency are enacted. The role of women’s agency in creating dynamic linkages between subjects, objects and social forces will also be investigated.

We are living in a period of ecocultural disintegration. The complexity and diversity of culture and ecology (ecocultural diversity) is being removed and/or homogenised by powerful forces all tied to modernity, global development and now, climate change. In some respects we are now all in the position of Indigenous peoples who have a lived experience of the desolation of their endemic sense of place and culture. But now, as global ecosystems and the climate change, the whole earth as ‘home’ becomes alien to us. Despite the scale and power of these transformations to our home at all scales, we generally lack the concepts to understand the negative and positive dimensions of our situation. This presentation will examine what I call ‘psychoterratic states’ with particular emphasis on the concept of solastalgia, developed by me to explain the lived experience of negative environmental change to a loved home environment. In this case, the loved home environment is Perth and its location within South West, Western Australia. I will conclude with some thoughts about positive concepts that oppose solastalgia that might bring about genuine sustainability and human happiness ... even in Perth.

Registrations are now open for an upcoming professional workshop entitled DNA: The good, the bad and the ugly. This lively two day workshop addresses everything you ever wanted to know about DNA but were too afraid to ask. The workshop is fun, interactive, and highly relevant for all lawyers, police officers and law enforcement personnel who need to know how to tackle DNA evidence. You will be taken from absolute first principles to what to ask the experts and how to understand and evaluate their answers. The workshop will be held over two days - Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th October - and costs $750 per person. Attendants are awarded a certificate of completion and 7 CPD points (if applicable). A limited number of places are available so REGISTER NOW to ensure you don't miss out!

Dr Felicity Baker is well known for her extensive research in the field of music therapy. In this lecture Dr Baker explores how therapeutic songwriting assists clients to manage their reactions to adversity. By creating songs in a therapeutic relationship, clients begin to address psychosocial, emotional, cognitive, and communication needs. Examples from Dr Baker’s research will be used to illustrate the profound benefit songwriting has for people with significant acquired disabilities.

Dr Alan Harvey, Winthrop Professor of Anatomy and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia, and researcher in the area of the neuroscience of music, will give a response to Dr Baker’s lecture.

A short musical performance will follow the lecture.

This is a Mental Health Week event.

We invite you to listen and engage in a lunch time conversation with members of the UWA community on the topic of ‘what matters to me and why’.

At each session an invited guest will speak about ‘what matters to me and why’ and then there will be an opportunity for questions and conversation. The speaker on this occasion is W/Prof Carolyn Oldham, Winthrop Professor, School of Environmental Systems Engineering

Bring your own lunch but please don’t carry coffee from the library café through the library. You can make a tea or coffee at the kitchenette at the meeting room if you wish.

Join Peter Newman, one of Australia's leading sustainability experts and Curtin's Professor of Sustainability as he discusses the possibility of a low carbon city for the future.

Peter has worked extensively in the field reviving and extending Perth's rail system, serving as the Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney and directing the production of the world's first state sustainability strategy. He has authored several books on climate change, peak oil, transport and resilient cities and is one of Australia's leading authorities on sustainability today.

Don't miss this unique opportunity to hear Peter's insights on the future of the way we live!

"Challenges of Publishing in an era of Impact Factor and Open Access - a view from the BMJ group"

It’s hard to maintain hope for the future of our civilization in the face of the flood of bad news in the media. But without hope, there is no hope.

It has been estimated that over a million organizations worldwide are working to change hearts and minds, create global networks of connection, develop and model alternatives, and take political action. In this seminar, I will give a brief overview of this global groundswell of action that promises to reach a tipping point of planetary transformation within the foreseeable future.

Hearts and minds are being changed by new media, social networking, education and personal transformation. Alternatives are being developed by building community locally and globally, creating alternative forms of settlement, adapting existing towns to climate change and post-peak oil, creating new economic and financial systems, increasing local food production and distribution, promoting new lifestyles, and developing green technologies. Meanwhile, grassroots political action is gaining traction through new approaches to campaigning powered by the web.

Bio,

Malcolm is Author of "The Science of Oneness" A worldview for the twenty-first century, and co-author with Christine Connelly of Hope for Humanity: How understanding and healing trauma could solve the planetary crisis.

****All Welcome****

Muhammad Fazril Razif is a PhD student based at WAIMR. In 2007, he graduated from Murdoch University with a Bachelor of Science (Biomedical Science/Molecular Biology) and Bachelor of Forensics. He subsequently pursued an Honours degree under the supervision of Prof. Luba Kalaydjieva, in which he graduated with first class honours. In 2009, Fazril joined Dr. Oliver Rackham’s lab where he is currently interested in the development of new biotechnology tools for the regulation of gene expression. His PhD is supported by a UWA SIRF scholarship.

Isabel was born in Mexico and obtained a Bachelor in Sciences, in Biology, at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, France in 2009. She started working at WAIMR during a Vacation Scholarship she was awarded at the Mitochondrial Medicine and Biology group in Aleksandra Filipovska’s laboratory. In 2010 she obtained a Scholarship for International Research Fees at UWA to do a PhD in the same laboratory, investigating how mitochondrial RNA processing contributes to the regulation of mitochondrial gene expression. The talk she will present is entitled RNA processing in human mitochondria and it is the introductory seminar of her PhD project.

Muslim feminists argue that there are at least two factors that contribute to the women’s subordination in Muslim societies. First, patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an which tend to subordinate women and blur the Qur’anic message of gender equality. Second, many Muslims cannot differentiate between cultural tradition and Islamic teaching, assuming that their cultural traditions are Islamic teaching. For example, some Pakistani Muslims (and Muslims in other countries such as Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Lebanon) have mistakenly regarded honor killing to be part of Islamic teaching; and some African Muslims (such as in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali) have mistakenly assumed that Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is part of Islamic tradition.

Nina Nurmila, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Islamic Education and Teaching,State Islamic University (UIN) Bandung, Indonesia,will explain how Muslim feminists challenge the male biased interpretation of the Qur’an and elaborate their re-interpretations of the Qur’an on gender issues such as the story of the creation of the first humankind, women’s leadership, inheritance and polygamy.

Got some Questions? Want some Answers? Come join us in Mental Health Week to pick the brains of our diverse panel of experts at SPAMH's inaugural Q&A event: Adventures In Mental Health. No issue is off-limits! Stalls from 7pm, Q&A from 7.30pm. Light supper provided. Dress code is smart casual. This is a free, public event. Our Panel: Mr. Eddie Bartnik - Mental Health Commissioner of WA; Clinical Professor Paul Skerritt - Consultant Psychiatrist, former President of the AMA (WA); Associate Professor Alex Main - Psychotherapist and Trauma Counsellor, Honorary Fellow of the School of Psychology, Murdoch University; Dr. Jock McLaren - Consultant Psychiatrist, Northern Psychiatric Services, Darwin NT, Author of "Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences"; Mr. Joe Calleja - CEO of the Richmond Fellowship of WA, former President of the Western Australian Asssociation for Mental Health; Ms. Leonie Ramsay - Mental Health Consumer and Advocate, Member of the National Register of Mental Health Consumer and Carer Representatives.

Register your attendance at http://spamhqanda.eventbrite.com. Places are strictly limited.

If you have a question that you would like to submit a question for panel discussion, send it to [email protected] or contact us via the registration page.

Workshop Description: Large classes mean the lecture class is maintained, yet effective teaching requires reconsidering how learners are engaged in the lecture time. ‘Active Learning’ is a principle which aims to involve students in the learning process, so that they are not simply passive (and inattentive) recipients of knowledge. Even simple tasks such as voting on a question engages students in the content delivery for better attention and retention of learning, and there are other strategies for having students actively engaged. This workshop will introduce you to the theory behind Active Learning, model a range of Active Learning strategies, and give you some practical tips and techniques to help you develop appropriate Active Learning activities for your lectures. The workshop will also touch on the use of technologies as active learning tools.

Intended Outcomes: By the end of this workshop you will be:

• aware of the theories behind Active Learning

• able to identify the benefits of Active Learning

• familiar with a range of Active Learning techniques

• equipped to develop and implement Active Learning strategies appropriate toyour teaching.

The second concert in the series in which UWA students present the Opus 20 string quartets of Haydn