What's On at UWA

Dr Mark Shackleton, one of the world’s leading cancer experts is a Medical Oncologist and a Group Leader of the Melanoma Research Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. After training in medical oncology at the Ludwig Institute in Melbourne, Dr Shackleton did his PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, USA. His research has been published in journals such as Nature, Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine. His lab focuses on understanding mechanisms of melanoma initiation and propagation.

A winner of the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Award for Medical Research, an NHMRC Achievement Award in 2010 and more recently the 2012 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year – Mark has had a remarkable decade of achievement. Dr Shackleton is a current Pfizer Australia Senior Research Fellow and a Fellow of the Victorian Endowment for Science, Knowledge and Innovation.

The Speaker: Professor Jane Pillow is a clinical academic neonatologist at the University of Western Australia. She is acknowledged internationally as an expert in the area of neonatal respiratory physiology and mechanical ventilation. She has a particular research interest in high-frequency ventilation, having completed her PhD thesis in 2000 on “Optimising High-Frequency Oscillatory Ventilation in Neonates”. Since completing her PhD with Distinction at ICHR, Prof Pillow’s research interests have expanded to focus on ways to minimise lung injury at the initiation of life and include high-frequency jet ventilation, variable ventilation, bubble CPAP, patient triggered ventilation and minimising lung injury during resuscitation. She has obtained over $11 million AUD in research funding, including grants from the NHMRC and the NIH, and is CIA on an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence. Her preclinical research uses the preterm lamb as a model of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome. She also runs a neonatal lung function laboratory, and is involved in follow-up functional studies of children born prematurely. In addition to her academic responsibilities, Prof Pillow is a Consultant Neonatologist at King Edward Memorial Hospital, where she contributes to the around the clock care of up to 100 babies, including up to 40 infants receiving mechanical ventilator support. Professor Pillow bases her academic activity at the UWA School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology.

The Seminar: Preclinical basic science is challenged increasingly by funding bodies focused on translational research outcomes. Nonetheless, there is little question that the preclinical sciences are a fundamental component of new advances in health care. Animal models of disease offer valuable insights into disease mechanisms, and offer value also for preclinical screening of new and controversial treatment. Preterm infants are a highly vulnerable population, for whom long-term outcomes of clinical interventions have life-long implications. A clinically relevant postnatal animal model offers rapid evaluation of safety, efficacy and long-term outcomes of new and/or controversial therapies for preterm infants and enhances research capacity. The Preclinical Intensive Care Research Unit or PICRU, is an exciting new nationally collaborative facility for evaluation of long-term outcomes of emerging fetal and neonatal treatments. The PICRU will be based in the Large Animal Facility at UWA, operating 24 hours/day for 7 days a week during study periods. The resource intensive nature of the studies makes optimization of research outcomes an imperative. Extensive tissue sampling and opportunities for longitudinal physiological recordings offer possibilities for collaborative gain. The PICRU will be staffed by paid undergraduates, enhancing the teaching-research nexus, and offering early exposure to the research environment. Initial funded studies commencing in September 2014 will target the neurodevelopmental and cardiorespiratory outcomes of postnatal steroids and ventilation strategy in the developing preterm lamb, and how these outcomes are influenced by an antenatal inflammatory stimulus.

Jane Ginsborg

Practice-led research in music-making: What it can tell us about learning

An Inquiring Minds lecture by Winthrop Professor David Sampson, Head, Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory (OBEL) and Director, Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation & Analysis (CMCA) at The University of Western Australia.

In this talk, Professor Sampson will tease apart fact from fiction in explaining new technology that allows us to see inside a living human body. He will describe how far we have come and what the future technology will bring. Be warned, this talk will contain lots of pictures, and some may contain blood.

Cost: Free, but RSVP required to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/sampson

Done well, teaching with technology has the potential to enhance learning. This can be achieved by the ways we present information, communicate with students, create communities, provide engaging learning experiences, and provide authentic learning and assessment tasks. This workshop will introduce the integration of technology into practice, demonstrate and explore practically a range of technology tools available for learning with technology, and consider curriculum design for effective practice.

This presentation addresses the central role of investment banks in bringing about the financial crisis of 2008. It specifically addresses some of the principal reasons why to date the investment banks and their executives have not been criminally prosecuted for grossly fraudulent activity in the lead-up to the financial crisis. Some reference is made to the quite different Icelandic response to its financial crisis, and the different outcome. Specific dimensions of wrong-doing by the investment banks are identified, as are some of the key criminogenic factors which contributed to their fraudulent activity. The case is advanced that a specifically criminological analysis is needed to make sense of the financial crisis, and the crimes of banks are considered in relation to conventional crimes against banks. The prominent Goldman Sachs investment bank receives special attention here, in relation to a long history of deceptive and harmful practices, and the on-going impunity with which it has engaged in these activities. Some broader policy implications of the crimes of Wall Street are addressed in a concluding section of this presentation.

Be transported from the everyday every Thursday in our free lunchtime concert series.

FREE 50min Concert every Thursday during Semester at 1:10pm. No booking required, just turn up!

This paper reports the results of a choice experiment to examine the features of marine offsets that the public finds acceptable. Offsets have become an established element of what is required if developments are to impose no net loss on the environment, once avoidance and mitigation activities have been undertaken. However, there are a number of means by which the same environmental outcome can be achieved. We explore the consequences for public acceptance of different designs of offsets relating to migratory shorebirds with respect to the proportion of direct and compensatory offsets, the geographical location at which the offset takes place, and the possibility of substituting species. Within the survey used we also develop a measure of the oil and gas industries Social License to Operate. We explore whether this measure has an impact on the probability of rejecting the development as a whole, as well as its impact on acceptability of attributes within the offset design. The paper concludes with implications for the further use of marine offsets.

Professor Michael Burton works in the area of environmental valuation, and is currently working on a project valuing marine biodiversity as part of the National Environmental Research Program Marine Biodiversity Hub.

TOPIC: How to improve your efficiency and effectiveness in applications for Research Ethics and Research Governance approval via the Health Department of Western Australia and SCGH: current and future directions. RSVP: https://clinicaltranslationalseminar28mar14.eventbrite.com.au OR Email: [email protected]

Michael Zieve (University of Michigan)

will speak on

Primitive groups, diophantine equations, and functional equations

at 3pm Friday March the 28th in Weatherburn Lecture Theatre.

Abstract:

I will explain how results about primitive groups play a crucial role in proving results about diophantine equations and functional equations. A sample application is that, for any polynomial f(X) with rational coefficients, the function Q-->Q defined by c --> f(c) is (<=6)-to-1 over all but finitely many values.

The Speaker: Professor Arun Dharmarajan obtained his PhD from the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology (then Department of Anatomy and Human Biology), University of Western Australia and carried out his postdoctoral position followed by faculty positions at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA. He spent the last 20 years in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology and is currently professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences, Curtin University. His interests are Wnt signalling in particular a Wnt antagonist, Secreted Frizzled Related Protein-4 (sFRP4) and its role in apoptosis, cancer biology and more recently cancer stem cells.

The Seminar: Malignant tumors have a highly tumourigenic subpopulation, termed cancer stem cells (CSCs) that drive tumor formation and proliferation. CSCs, unlike the bulk of the cells within the tumour, are elusive to drug treatment. They are chemo- and radio-resistant and the central cause for tumour initiation and recurrence. These self-renewing cells are responsible for the flare-up of cancer and remission, long after treatment. The existence of CSCs has been confirmed in many tumour types including gliomas, breast, lung, prostate, head and neck, and colon cancers. Wnt/ß-catenin signalling plays a role in the proliferation of tumour cells and tumour progression and frizzled-4, a member of the Wnt signalling family, governs both stemness and invasiveness of glioma stem cells. In a recent study, we demonstrated that a naturally occurring Wnt antagonist, secreted frizzled-related protein 4 (sFRP4), chemosensitizes and inhibits glioma stem cell proliferation by reducing self-renewal and inducing differentiation. In a recent report, we examined the effect of sFRP4 in chemosensitizing the glioma cell line U138MG and glioma stem cells (GSCs) enriched from U138MG to chemotherapeutics. We found that sFRP4 alone, and in combination with either DOX or cisplatin, induced apoptosis and substantially decreased proliferation in a GSC-enriched population.

A public lecture by Robert J. Naiman, Emeritus Professor, School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, University of Washington.

For nearly three decades Professor Naiman and his colleagues have been examining ecological processes in rivers and floodplains of the North American coastal rainforests and the savannas of southern Africa. Despite strong contrasts in climate and water regimes, there are a number of surprising similarities that impart ecological integrity. In both Ecoregions the characteristics of floodplain vegetation are intimately linked to flow regimes, floodplain soils acquire nutrients quickly and thereby contribute to robust plant growth, large mammals and fish play fundamentally important roles, and dead wood in river channels is paramount in shaping future ecological conditions.

This lecture will explore many of these similarities, and some contrasts, as an emerging understanding of basic ecological processes helps underpin improved resource management for river floodplains.

Cost: free, but RSVP required to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/naiman

A public lecture by Richard Eldridge, the Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA.

The study of literature has always had a central place in advanced curricula, at least if one includes rhetoric, grammar, composition, and ancient and modern philology within it. One would scarcely be thought to be an educated person if one lacked an acquaintance with the classics of one’s native language tradition: in English - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Eliot, Dickens, and all the rest.

Yet at the same time, many are now uneasy about the value of literature and its study. Compared with the natural and social sciences, where both clearer methods and results that are of practical importance are often in view, reading, writing, and studying literature can seem a matter more of entertainment and social capital than a serious business. Both funding and enrollments in humanities courses have dropped over the past forty years, and within departments of literature study of classic texts has often given way to broader forms of Cultural Studies that resemble sociology rather than being centrally concerned with literary art. Why, then, should we study literature at all, especially at university level? Does literature in any way present important truths that are worth serious study?

The question of truth in literature has several interrelated senses: can literature present (significant) truths at all?; how does its presentation of truths (if it exists) have to do with its manner of presentation (with literary language)?; and is the presentation of truth a central aim of literary art? After surveying and criticizing a variety of Fregean and neo-Fregean views (Frege, Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) that reject the very possibility of literary truth and a variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it, but in misleading terms that do not say enough about literary language, Professor Eldridge will argue that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his Lectures on Fine Art shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: die poetische Auffassung der Welt.

The talk will conclude with some brief remarks on the contemporary novel.

Cost: Free, but RSVP required to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/eldridge

Asymptomatic infection has long been an omnipresent feature of a diversity of diseases in animals (including humans) and plants. This phenomenon has received relatively little attention amidst the contemporary cacophony focused on disease elimination and even eradication.

Malaria transmission between asymptomatic carriers poses a particularly vexing problem, and raises serious questions about the tractability of elimination targets. In the context of plant pathology, Huanglongbing (HLB), or citrus greening, a vector-transmitted bacterial infection of citrus trees has wreaked havoc on citrus crops in Asia and Latin America and is currently a major problem for the Florida and California citrus industries.

One of the most under-studied aspects of HLB is disease transmission during the several years from initiation of infection in a grove until symptoms actually become manifest. We discuss case examples of malaria transmission in the Brazilian Amazon region and asymptomatic HLB in Florida, introducing recent experimental results integrated with spatially explicit mathematical modeling to provide deeper understanding of the phenomenon of asymptomatic carriers and the mitigation strategies that they suggest.

We briefly indicate lessons from malaria and HLB that carry over to a broad range of infectious diseases in animals and plants. A vast array of open research problems is also part and parcel of our topic.

Brief Biography,

Burton Singer is Adjunct Professor in the Emerging Pathogens Institute and Department of Mathematics at University of Florida. From 1994 - July, 2009, he was Professor of Demography and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He was formerly chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and professor of economics and statistics at Yale University (1984 – 1993), and Professor of Statistics at Columbia University (1967 – 1984).

He has served as chair of the National Research Council Committee on National Statistics and as chair of the Steering Committee for Social and Economic Research in the World Health Organization Tropical Disease Research (TDR) program. He is currently on the Research Board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, focused on both short- and long-term consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

He has centered his research in three principal areas: identification of social, biological, and environmental risks associated with vector-borne diseases in the tropics; integration of psychosocial and biological evidence to characterize pathways to alternative states of health; and health impact assessments associated with economic development projects.

His research program has included studies of: the impact of migration and urbanization on malaria transmission in the western Amazon region of Brazil and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; the biological correlates of well-being. and health consequences of gene- environment interactions focused on the social environment; and health impacts over time of large-scale development projects in the tropics, with particular emphasis on forcibly resettled communities.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1994), the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (2005) and was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981-1982. Ph.D. He received his PhD in Statistics from Stanford University in 1967.

Apologies for the short notice change.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

Pro-environmental agricultural approaches have been developed, but their uptake has not been sufficient to mitigate environmental degradation. A lack of suitable theoretical frameworks limits research on famers' environmental behaviours, and there has been little integration of social sciences in the agricultural adoption literature. This paper details a predictive model of pro-environmental agricultural practices, drawing on psychological frameworks: Value-Belief-Norms and Theory of Planned Behaviour. Dry-land farmers in Central New South Wales, Australia (n = 422), were surveyed about behaviours deemed to have positive impacts on the environment by local natural resource management authorities. A rigorous measure of complex land management practice is developed in relation to native vegetation, weeds, soil, stock, and perennials. The model was able to predict 52% of the variance in complex behaviour. Contextual factors, values, attitudes, and norms are identified as important predictors. Results suggest skills and abilities, environmental constraints, biospheric values, and a sense of being able to control one's destiny are significant precursors to pro-environmental practices. The NRM policy context and policy implications are discussed. Holistic strategies and social learning processes are identified as beneficial for farmer well-being and environmental outcomes.

Jennifer Price is an environmental psychologist with the Social and Behavioural Sciences Group of the CSIRO, within the Ecosystem Sciences Division. Her research applies social science to a broad range of natural resource domains and challenges, including agricultural land management practice, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and public acceptance of water supply schemes. Her research interests centre on identifying how cultural values and beliefs about environment shape individuals’ environmental behaviour, policy preferences, and risk perceptions. This work reveals how elements of social identity and personality influence the way people interpret and respond to environmental issues.

Information environmentalism is a normative discourse that seeks to protect and nurture the information commons. The information commons is important within the information age because it provides critical raw material for creativity and innovation. An outstanding challenge when protecting and nurturing the information commons is defining its parameters. Something cannot be protected until it is clearly delineated. Yet delineation alone is not enough. For this reason, the book seeks to build an information environmental governance framework. This framework can be relied upon when seeking to protect and nurture the information environment (generally) and the information commons (specifically). The framework is built upon four discrete theoretical foundations of environmentalism: (i) welfare economics; (ii) the commons; (iii) ecology; and (iv) public choice theory. In building an information environmental governance framework, the costs of propertising information and the benefits of the information commons are underscored. Several innovative governance tools are also advanced, including an information environmental discipline (information ecology), an information environmental ethic, Information Commons Rights, informational national parks and the separation of (economic) power doctrine.

Throughout his professional career, Robert has engaged with the law in his capacity as both legal practitioner and academic. As a legal practitioner his efforts have largely concentrated on the provision of legal information, court advocacy and education within the Community Legal Centre sector. In academia his pursuits have primarily focused on the manner in which the law interfaces with sustainability, corporate accountability, international trade, and intellectual property rights. He is currently engaging in a book concerning the intersection between theories of environmentalism and intellectual property rights to be published by Edward Elgar later this year. Along with a PhD from the Australian National University, Robert holds a Bachelor of Business (Accounting), Bachelor of Laws (Hons), Master of Laws (Hons), and a Graduate Certificate of Legal Practice from the University of Technology Sydney. He presently lectures in Intellectual Property: Creative Rights, and is Unit Coordinator of Corporations Law, International Trade Law and Corporate Finance & Securities Regulation within the UWA Faculty of Law.

Cai-Heng Li (UWA)

will speak on

Edge transitive dessins d'enfant

at 3pm Friday April the 4th in Weatherburn Lecture Theatre.

Abstract:

A 2-cell embedding of a bipartite graph in an orientable surface is called a dessin d'enfant. Thus a dessin d'enfant is an orientable bipartite map. I will present an explicit representation of an edge transitive dessin in terms of a group with two distinguished generators, and apply it to study the dessin.

Group work is continually being touted as a beneficial and necessary process for student learning and yet students often complain about it both from the point of view of distribution of work and fairness of assessment. How do you ensure students actually learn all that is intended and don't merely divide the content and work between them? How do you ensure even contribution by students towards their group task? International best practice in group work, that students enjoy and that enhances their learning, will be demonstrated. Case studies of methods being employed at UWA will be discussed.

There will be presentations by international visitors, games, prizes, a photo booth, treats on offer and lots and lots of information about exchange and study abroad opportunities for UWA students.

The Speaker: Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Catts’ leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Catts was recognized by Thames & Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. His work has been widely exhibited internationally in venues such as NY MoMA, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and National Art Museum of China. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London, and a Visiting Professor at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki where he was commissioned to set up Biofilia - Base for Biological Art and Design. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.

The Seminar: In the last three years I have been researching the unintentionality of human impact on environmental systems through a series of research trips to the far north of Lapland, and recently Western Australia. I have been exploring Metagenomics as a story telling tool; using environmental DNA sequencing of sites where human impacted the environment in unpredictable ways. In this talk I will combine these stories with my other research interest of regenerative biology for non-medical ends, such as consumer products, art and design. I will outline these developments in areas such as in vitro meat and leather, actuators and bio machine interfaces, speculative design and contemporary artistic practices. I will draw on my experience of using tissue engineering for non-medical ends to speculate about what lead to these applications and their possible future developments. Avoiding utopian and dystopian postures and using the notion of the contestable, I will highlight some philosophical and ethical consideration stemming from the notion of the unintentional consequences of human urge to understand and manipulate.