What's On at UWA

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.

A public lecture by Denis Weaire, Emeritus Professor, School of Physics, Trinity College, Dublin and 2014 UWA Gledden Visiting Fellow.

The study of liquid foams has a long and fascinating history, involving for example the blind Belgian physicist JAF Plateau and the inspiring figure of Lord Kelvin in the 19th century. It remains a lively and wide research topic, and has spilled over into art and architecture, as well as many applications in industry. Professor Weaire will present a personal overview of the subject, ranging from basic mathematical questions to tomographic analysis of foam structures, which should interest a wide range of scientists and engineers, and be accessible to a wider audience as well.

This workshop will focus on the criteria and evidence that can be included in a teaching portfolio and used for PDR and promotion. You will leave this session confident and eager to make a start on your own portfolio. This workshop is a good follow-up to the 'What counts as evidence of good teaching' workshop.

Banksia woodland coves half the recharge area to the Gnangara Mound, Perth’s most important water resource. To help understand the water balance and carbon balance of this native woodland we have installed an eddy covariance system measuring the atmospheric turbulence and scalar fluxes above the vegetation.

It is coupled to soil moisture monitoring and a piezometer network to enable closing the water balance. The site, 70 km north of Perth, has been selected as representative of the recharge area and its ecological value. These measurements enable a better calculation of recharge to the groundwater under this ecosystem than previously available, and will monitor how the vegetation is responding to changes in climate and other influences.

We now have nearly two years of measurement that enable estimation of recharge and the dynamics of carbon assimilation in the woodland. This work comes from a site in the OzFlux network of atmospheric flux stations around Australia, and is supported by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) of the Australian Government, and CSIRO under its Climate and Atmosphere Theme.

Biography,

Dr Richard Silberstein is a catchment hydrologist investigating interactions between vegetation and surface and groundwater, particularly in the context of a drying climate. He is the Groundwater-Vegetation interactions Team Leader in CSIRO Land and Water.

His research interests include modelling vegetation response to climate, soil, water and salt conditions, field and modelling studies of catchment forest dynamics and water yield, recharge under changing land use and climate, and ecosystem function and landscape water balance through multiple techniques, including atmospheric fluxes, soil and vegetation monitoring and remote sensing.

Dr Silberstein currently leads the surface water modelling in the Pilbara Water Resources Assessment of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship. He previously led a similar component of the South-west Western Australia Sustainable Yields Project and a Water Foundation Project 'Vegetation dynamics and water yield under changing climate and management' which studied the interactions between catchment vegetation growth and stream flow in the context of changing climate and historical forestry.

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

****All Welcome****

Natural resource managers and conservationists are often confronted with the challenges of uncertainty. In this talk, I will present some of work done for my PhD, in which I used a multidisciplinary approach to gain a better understanding of the role and implications of different sources and types of uncertainty for the management of social-ecological systems. Giving special attention to the issues of observation and implementation uncertainty, I used the conservation of harvested ungulate species in the Serengeti, Tanzania, as a case study to ask questions regarding the monitoring of wildlife and illegal resource use, and the implementation of effective conservation actions.

Ana Nuno recently completed her PhD at Imperial College, London and is interested in the complexities of managing social-ecological systems. Initially trained as a biologist, Ana soon realized that looking only at ecological or social factors in isolation provides a very incomplete picture of the systems where conservation and natural resource management occur. Ana is particularly interested in applying multidisciplinary approaches to conservation which support robust decision-making under uncertainty and is looking forward to new collaborations.

Determinantal point process (DPP) models constitute one of the few non-Poisson point process model classes where we have access to closed form expressions for both the likelihood function and the moments. Furthermore, we have an exact simulation algorithm which avoids the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In this talk I will define a DPP and briefly review some of these appealing properties which make DPP models well suited for statistical analysis. I will then demonstrate how simulation and statistical inference for DPPs is carried out in practice using software developed in R. Specifically, I will show how we have analyzed several real datasets using this software and the DPP framework. This includes model specification, parameter estimation, simulation from the fitted model, and goodness-of-fit assessment.

Time permitting, I will end the talk with a brief demonstration of how recent developments allow us to extend the software to handle stationary DPPs on a sphere (e.g. the surface of Earth).

The main part of the work has been carried out in collaboration with Jesper Moller from Aalborg University and Fre'de'ric Lavancier from Nantes University, while the final part concerning DPPs on spheres is an ongoing collaboration which also includes Morten Nielsen (Aalborg University).

Australia’s grain supply infrastructure has been in the news. Late last year the Federal Government blocked ADM’s proposed take-over of GrainCorp. Here in Western Australia, Bunge have built grain export port facilities in Bunbury and the Chinese firm Heilingjiang Feng Agricultural are currently constructing port terminal facilities in Albany. ABC television’s Landline program ran a 25 minute feature on Australian export grain infrastructure on March 9. Why is there interest in this infrastructure? This seminar will present findings of recent research that has examined the nature and cost of Australia’s export grain supply chains. Some interesting facts emerge with important ramifications for the future of Australia’s grains industry.

Currently Ross is chief economist in AEGIC (Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre) that is a joint initiative of the WA Department of Agriculture & Food and the Grains R&D Corporation. He is also a professor in the School of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Western Australia. He serves on a federal Department of Agriculture’s Expert Advisory Panel and chairs the Australian Farm Institute’s research advisory committee. He has been a co-editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, president of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society and is a distinguished fellow of that society. In a recent book on the history of DAFWA Ross is listed of one its 50 most historically influential people.

Steven Noble (Brunel University)

will speak on

Graphs are to matroids what ribbon graphs are to ...?

at 3pm Friday April the 11th in Weatherburn Lecture Theatre.

Abstract:

Much of the combinatorial structure of an abstract connected graph is encoded in its set of spanning trees. These form one of the canonical examples of the bases of a matroid. Ribbon graphs contain extra topological information on the embedding of the underlying abstract graph in a surface. The structures playing the role of spanning trees are the subgraphs having one boundary component. The combinatorial structure which they form is a delta-matroid, which roughly speaking is like a matroid except that the bases do not need to have the same size. We will discuss three classes of delta-matroids, some natural operations on ribbon graphs which correspond to natural operations on delta-matroids, give an excluded minor theorem for one of the classes of delta-matroids and, time-permitting describe the Bollobas-Riordan polynomial which forms one way of generalizing the Tutte polynomial to ribbon graphs.

Masterclass - Mark Coughlan

In recent years there has been an international boom of contemporary arts by Muslims living in and outside the West. This global eruption of creative expression defies traditional boundaries by melding histories, lived experiences and artistic practices in an effort to express multiple Muslim identities.

Creative Expressions of Muslim Identity through Contemporary art is a unique symposium bringing together world-renowned French-Tunisian graffiti artist eL Seed and Sydney based graphic designer Peter Gould alongside an array of emerging Perth artists including Tusif Ahmad, Suzi Elhafez and Abdul Abdullah.

The Symposium will focus on two themes; Classical interplays of Islamic art and Creative expressions of Muslim experiences to answer the following questions:

• What is the importance of arts and creativity in Islamic traditions? • What are current understandings of arts and creative expression in Muslim communities locally and internationally? • What opportunities and challenges exist between ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ Islamic art and contemporary art by Muslims? And; • How do Muslim artists interpret their experiences of being Muslim into multiple contemporary art forms?

We expect the symposium to be open and constructive with the aim of listening and viewing the work of the artists and panelists.

Guests are also welcome to join the artists and other guests for a post-symposium dinner at 6pm.

Symposium Cost: $30 Student/Concession $35 Full/Standard

Post-Symposium Dinner Cost: $15 Student/Concession $20 Full/Standard

A lecture by Julie McKay, Executive Director, Australian National Committee for UN Women.

Despite significant increases in public debate about gender equality and the empowerment of women, progress towards equality for women is slow, and risks stalling. While measures of women’s workforce participation and women’s educational attainment are used to demonstrate equality, there is very limited public debate on what success would look like with regards to equal opportunities for men and women.

This lecture will outline a vision for equality, focusing on key levers for accelerating progress towards gender equality and discuss the actions required of the international community and the Australian community in 2014.

Cost: free, but RSVP required via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/2014-gvl