What's On at UWA

The Seminar: Obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) are major health problems in Australia. All are characterised by an initial accumulation of lipids which, along with the contribution of confounding factors, such as iron, can lead to organ dysfunction and death. In the presence of existing fat deposits, iron has been linked to progression of NAFLD, via the production of free radicals. Recently we have shown that iron may be involved in the initial lipid accumulation by stimulating production of cholesterol in the liver. Importantly, this cholesterol may accumulate in the mitochondria; mitochondrial cholesterol accumulation has been associated with NAFLD. These data are consistent with an increase in total hepatic lipid burden and a role for iron in the early stages of fatty liver disease

The Speaker: Ross completed his PhD in Physiology at UWA in 1997 studying non-transferrin bound iron uptake in the liver. He retained his interest in metal metabolism following his move to London in 1998, working at the University of London where he studied the synthesis of vitamin B12 in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the pathogen which causes many lung infections in cyctic fibrosis patients. In 2004, he returned to Western Australia to work in the School of Medicine & Pharmacology, UWA, continuing his work on iron in the liver, focussing on the role of transferrin receptor 2 in iron uptake and how mutations in this protein cause a rare form of the iron-loading disorder, haemochromatosis. This work led to identification of a role for iron in the biosynthesis of cholesterol, implicating iron as a factor in liver disease and obesity. In 2011, he moved to Curtin University where he is continuing his research into liver iron and its effects on other metabolic processes.

The next Soil&Water Seminar will be Prof. Matthew Tonts from SEE, at 12pm on Weds, Oct 3rd. All welcome!

Title: “The Staples Economy and Regional Development in Western Australia”

Abstract: In the 1930s, Canadian historian Harold Innis developed his 'staples thesis' to explain the ways in which a high level of dependence on primary industries (notably agriculture, fishing, forestry and mining) had led to a distinctive form of regional development within Canada. Innis was particularly concerned with understanding why staples dependence is often associated with a volatile and often truncated form of economic development. Given some of the economic, political and geographical similarities between Canada and Australia, it is perhaps surprising that the staples thesis has not been applied to systematic assessment of regional development in Australia. This seminar draws reflects on the experience of two regions, the Goldfields and Wheatbelt, to examine the relevance of the staples thesis to understanding the pattern of regional development in Australia.

Extreme rainfall over the south and north-west of Western Australia and the Sydney region of NSW over the last fifty years has been modelled using a Bayesian hierarchical approach based on statistical extreme value theory. Spatial variability of the extreme rainfall distribution is modelled using a Gaussian process, derived from a convolution kernel approach.

This is a flexible approach, accommodating rainfall measured over different durations (from sub- to super-daily) and also allowing for the possibility of linking the extremes to external drivers.

The approach can be used to characterize the behaviour of extremes under present day and projected future conditions. It can be used to derive intensity-frequency-duration curves • together with estimates of their associated uncertainties, • for specific locations that can be either gauged or ungauged, and • provide information for the design of engineering structures such as culverts, bridges, and stormwater and sewerage systems. Extensions to model extremes of areal rainfall, with applications to depth-area curves for example, will be described.

This talk will focus more on the methodology than the application.

Bio,

Mark is a senior statistician with CSIRO, in the Division of Mathematics, Informatics and statistics. He has applied statistics to problems of spatial modelling for many years, in particular the modelling sediment composition in rivers, estuaries and dams. Recently he has been developing spatial approaches to the analysis of extreme rainfall for the Indian Ocean Climate Initiative,

The Upper Parramatta River Catchment Trust and the federal government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. His statistical interest also include the application of Bayesian methodologies and hierarchical modelling.



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

****All Welcome****

Be transported away from the everyday with our exciting line-up of Thursday 1.10pm, free lunchtime concerts. This year's revamped Lunchtime Concert series features the best of our students in solo and small ensemble performance.

Professor Gail Risbridger is an NH&MRC Research Fellow, career academic and researcher who has > 20 years experience in Prostate Cancer research and Men’s Health. She graduated from, and taught at Monash University, until becoming a founding member of the Monash Institute of Medical Research (MIMR). Currently she heads the Prostate and Breast Cancer Research Group in the Department of Anatomy & Developmental Biology at Monash University leading an internationally recognised research team of scientists and clinicians working on prostate cancer and Andrology related projects. She currently holds the positions of Deputy Dean, Strategic Projects, Research Director of Monash Comprehensive Cancer Consortium (MCCC) and Chair, Faculty Research Centres & Institutes Committee as well as advisory roles in Andrology Australia and the Freemasons Foundation Centre for Men’s Health. She is one of Australia’s leading prostate cancer researchers, has authored over >190 publications, and has received more than $22.9 million in National and International grant funding since 2003. Her awards include an International Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, British Endocrine Society Asia-Oceania Medal and Honorary Life Member of Endocrine Society of Australia.

Physical processes in lakes are the result of a large number of different mechanisms occurring over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales affecting ecosystem function in a variety of ways. Hence, a deep understanding of the lake hydrodynamics and its variability is essential in understanding lake ecosystem function and in managing water quality.

In this talk I will present a detailed analysis of the annual thermal regime of Lake Kinneret based on high-resolution thermistor chain and meteorological data collected by CWR during the period April 2007 - April 2008. Periods taking along the yearly cycle will be used to discuss the main physical aspects of the lake hydrodynamics and their effects on ecological processes.

Part of the material to be presented in this seminar constitutes a book chapter entitled “The seasonal hydrodynamic habitat of Lake Kinneret” by Imberger, J. and Marti, C. L., contained within the book “Lake Kinneret - Ecology and Management” to be published in 2013.

Bio,

Clelia is a field-oriented Physical Limnologist and provides scientific leadership to real time field investigation in aquatic environments. Her research interests lie in transport and mixing processes in lakes, rivers, estuaries and coastal seas.

She has made substantial contribution to the understanding of the benthic boundary layer in stratified lakes and its central role in setting up a volume flux that is responsible for transporting nutrient rich water from the deepest part of the lake into the thermocline where it becomes available for primary production in the surface layer.

Clelia performs basic and applied research and has been involved in several projects that have a problem oriented and interdisciplinary focus. She has conducted field work in a number of sites around the world including Lake Kinneret (Israel), Thomson Reservoir (Australia), Cockburn Sound (Australia), Lake Valle de Bravo (Mexico), Setubal Lagoon (Argentina), Parana River (Argentina), Lake Coeur d'Alene (USA), and Lake Constance (Germany).

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

****All Welcome****

Come along and find out about the interesting and diverse range of Arts broadening units you can study as part of your degree.

You can learn a language (there are nine to choose from), gain an understanding of the politics of the Asian region, enhance your creative writing, revel in your favourite part of history or play in a musical ensemble. All this can be done as part of your degree!

Enhance your study and career prospects and study an Arts broadening unit.

Be transported away from the everyday with our exciting line-up of Thursday 1.10pm, free lunchtime concerts. This year's revamped Lunchtime Concert series features the best of our students in solo and small ensemble performance.

Beach morphology is the result of complex interactions between sand transport, mean sea level, wind, surface gravity waves, and currents, all of which act over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Interactions with rocky landforms add another level of complexity to the mechanisms of beach variability and change. At Yanchep Lagoon in south-western Australia, the sandy beaches are perched on Quaternary limestone reefs. Sand transport at Yanchep Lagoon varies over a wide range of temporal scales and is strongly modified by interactions with the topographically-complex reefs. To better understand how sand transport is affected by the reefs, a suite of numerical models that covered a cascade of spatial scales from the ocean to the beach was used.

First, the wave climate and variability of the southern Indian Ocean was hindcast from 1970 to 2009 using the WAVEWATCH III ® model validated with data around the WA coastline. There was a significant positive trend in annual mean wave height which appeared to be due to an increase in intensity of the storm belt in the Southern Ocean. The hindcast of offshore wave conditions were then used in a regional scale model (SWAN), where the nearshore transformation of the largest wave event on record was simulated. Shallow limestone reefs on the inner-shelf efficiently dissipated 70 to 80% of the wave energy. At the beach, waves breaking on nearshore reefs generated strong, complex currents. Simulations of beach morphology, using XBeach_gpu indicated that the nearshore reefs and resulting currents affect the beach morphology not only in the lee of the reef but also along the adjacent beaches to the north. The evolution ofperched beaches under climate change and sea level rise can be predicted using a better understanding of how rocky landforms influence beach morphology; and of the down-scaling of larger scale processes from the ocean to the beach.

Spring Feast Thursday 11th October 6pm @ Guild Village

"Spring Feast" - two words that, over the years, have become synonymous with UWA's Multicultural Week Festival. This massive food festival is one of UWA's largest on-campus events attracting thousands of people from the university and the general public!! This year's Spring Feast will help bring to life cultural folk tales - the theme for MCW 2012!

So come down to the UWA GUILD VILLAGE on THURSDAY OCTOBER 11. A huge number of food stalls will be waiting for you to eat to your heart's content and an array of magical performances!! We hope that you can help us celebrate multiculturalism by being a part of this great festival of food, dance, art, culture and everything which makes UWA such a wonderfully diverse community!

The Callaway Lecture is one of the most prestigious events on the School of Music calendar. Over the last two decades, a host of distinguished speakers have taken the podium to deliver their thoughts on subjects as broad ranging as the effects of music on the mind, and the place of music in the arts.

In 2012 the lecture will be presented by Artistic Director of The Academy of Ancient Music.

Richard Egarr

HIP: The Next Generation

After 60 years of the most recent movement in music scholarship and performance concerned with Historically Informed Performance (HIP), this talk explores where has such research brought us and where is it going? The continuing mission seems to be to seek out new sources, new information: 'to boldly go' where no HIP has gone before. In order to trace these achievements, an exploration of early sound recordings perhaps offers us some insights?

The evening is co-sponsored by ARC Centre for the History of Emotions.

To reserve your seat: Email: [email protected] Telephone: 08 6488 7836

Dr. Susan Peters is a postdoctoral research associate at the Epidemiology Group of the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research. Her research activities focus on exposure assessment methods to apply in (occupational) cancer epidemiology.

Want to go on exchange to Asia? Come along to the info session to hear specific details on studying in Asia. Meet UWA students who have studied there as well as students studying at UWA from Asia.

The Seminar: Promotion of lung volume recruitment in atelectatic lung and maintenance of existing recruited lung are vital goals of contemporary ventilatory support. In the mature lung, the recruitment of terminal airspaces are governed by power-law distributions, arising from avalanches associated with threshold pressure phenomena propagating down a branching tree structure. There is increasing evidence that the superimposition of noise on the pressure waveform during conventional can promote recruitment of collapsed lung zones when the peak inspiratory pressure is at or around the lower inflexure and that this approach may also promote production of endogenous surfactant. The mechanism likely involves the phenomenon of stochastic resonance. Stochastic resonance is most simply described as the addition of noise to a weak input signal to enhance output in a nonlinear system. It is a widespread, naturally occurring phenomenon that can be seen reflected in the patterns of world weather, fluctuations on the stock market, population biology, and optimal functioning of neural networks, to name but a few. The essential ingredients for stochastic resonance are a nonlinear dynamic system, a weak biologic signal, and superimposed noise. Recent studies comparing variable to constant volume and rhythm ventilation patterns in newborn lambs demonstrate a physiological advantage of variable input for lung volume recruitment, and upregulation of surfactant protein and developmental genes, suggesting that the newborn lung is programmed to respond to variability, and that variability may confer survival advantage. The Speaker: Professor Jane Pillow is a clinical academic neonatologist at the University of Western Australia and Co-Director of the newly formed UWA Centre for Neonatal Research and Education. She is acknowledged internationally as an expert in the area of neonatal respiratory physiology and mechanical ventilation. Prof Pillow is internationally renowned for her particular expertise in high-frequency ventilation, having undertaken completed her PhD thesis in 2000 on “Optimising High-Frequency Oscillatory Ventilation in Neonates”. Since completing her PhD with Distinction in 2000, Prof Pillow’s research interests have expanded to include high-frequency jet ventilation, variable ventilation, bubble CPAP, patient triggered ventilation and minimising lung and diaphragmatic injury during resuscitation. Her research group in Perth undertakes animal studies using the preterm lamb as a model of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome, many of which are performed in collaboration with interstate and international colleagues in medical, physiological, anatomical and biomedical engineering departments. Future plans for the lamb work include the development of a preterm lamb intensive care unit for long term ventilation of preterm lambs. At KEMH, Professor Pillow also runs a neonatal lung function laboratory, and is involved in clinical trials and follow-up functional studies of children born prematurely in addition to involvement in clinical trials. Jane has obtained over $4.5 million AUD in research funding, including 4 grants from the NHMRC (3 as CIA) and 3 grants from the NIH and has had continuous scholarship and fellowship funding from the NHMRC and Viertel Foundation since 1997. She has extensive involvement in peer-review activities relevant to neonatal research, mechanical ventilation and respiratory physiology. In addition to her academic responsibilities, Prof Pillow is a Consultant Neonatologist in the Women’s and Newborn’s Health Service. She is currently based within the UWA Centre of Neonatal Research and Education and the Neonatal Clinical Care Unit at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, which has 100 neonatal beds including 30 bed NICU, but which caters frequently for up to 40 infants on mechanical ventilation or CPAP.

Find out why your bike makes noises, is hard to ride, or why the gears and brakes aren't that great.

Doctor Bike will fix minor mechanical problems and give advice on what's wrong and how to fix it.

Whilst trade and enterprise have led Australia's bilateral relations with China, education promotes mutual understanding and long lasting links. This year's forum will focus on developing Chinese language and cultural competency in schools, universities and industry. His Excellency Mr Chen Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to Australia, will provide the keynote address and a panel of business leaders and education representatives will share their experiences.

Want to go on exchange to Scandinavia? Come along to the info session to hear specific details on studying in Scandinavia. Meet UWA students who have studied there as well as students studying at UWA from Scandinavia.

Ross completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Western Australia and joined WAIMR in 2008 where he undertook an honours project in the Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Drug Discovery supervised by Dr Aleksandra Filipovska and Dr Oliver Rackham. In 2009 he began a PhD (also in the Rackham/Filipovska lab) and has investigated the role of rRNA in controlling the efficiency of selenocysteine incorporation.

The ribosome is a 2.5 MDa molecular machine that converts the information encoded in mRNA into protein, following the rules defined by the genetic code. In all organisms protein composition is limited to 20 amino acids, with the rare exceptions of pyrrolysine and selenocysteine. Although rarely used in the proteome, the incorporation of selenocysteine into proteins is essential for life in many organisms, including humans. The mRNA encoding a selenoprotein has a stem loop known as a SECIS following a UGA stop codon that facilitates the ribosome to introduce selenocysteine at the stop codon. This requires a unique set of factors used only for the synthesis and insertion of selenocysteine (SelA, SelB, SelC and SelD).

The human proteome includes 25 selenoproteins that are mostly uncharacterised because of the inability to express them in bacteria. This is due to the divergence of RNA and protein factors as well as the inherently low efficiency of selenocysteine incorporation in bacteria. We have developed a reporter gene that provides a life/death selection for selenocysteine incorporation and identified mutations in the 16S rRNA which affect the efficiency of the process. This was validated using the endogenous E. coli selenoprotein formate dehydrogenase H. This opens the door for high efficiency site-specific incorporation of selenocysteine and the study of recombinant human selenoproteins. Furthermore the identification of sequences that alter ribosome function provides information on the fundamental biology of protein synthesis.

Macroecological theory predicts that along direct physiological gradients there will be unimodal abundance distributions of species and consistent rates of assemblage turnover. However, the majority of marine studies that have investigated the realised distribution of species along latitudinal or temperature gradients have generally found unimodal distributions to be rare.

We asses fish distributions along a temperature gradient in a stable oligotrophic seascape and suggest that unimodal distributions will be more common. The high diversity and percentage of endemic species in terrestrial and marine habitats of southwestern Australia is likely due to the stable geological and oceanographic history of the region.

In comparison, studies of abundance distribution in other marine systems have been conducted in relatively heterogeneous and productive environments. The old, climatically buffered, oligotrophic seascape of southwestern Australia has provided a simple system in which the consistent influence of physiological gradients on the abundance distribution of fish species can be observed.

short Bio,

Timothy Langlois is a research fellow in the School of Plant Biology and Oceans Institute at the University Western Australia, Perth.

His research examines continental-scale changes in macroecological patterns as revealed by analyses of non-destructive video surveys of fish assemblages and concurrent physical and biological time series. Tim also works within the West Australian Marine Science Institute to develop monitoring programmes to investigate changes in fish assemblages associated with environmental variation and human pressure.

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

****All Welcome****

Be transported away from the everyday with our exciting line-up of Thursday 1.10pm, free lunchtime concerts. This year's revamped Lunchtime Concert series features the best of our students in solo and small ensemble performance.