2016 Vice-Chancellor’s Research Awards Faculty of Science winners and finalists

>> LOUISE RYAN: Ever since I can remember I’ve been interested in mathematics — even as a little kid I like I liked numbers and maths and so on.

But as I got older I found that I really wanted to do things that were connected to the real world, so I ended up in the field of statistics because it really is this beautiful combination of mathematics as it’s applied in the real world and using mathematics and statistics to try to solve real-world problems.

When I look back at my career and I try to think of the times when I feel like I’ve made the best contributions, where it’s made most difference, it’s generally been when I’ve been part of a larger team tackling a real-world problem, and one that comes to mind is when I was part of a national academy committee looking at health effects of in-utero exposure to methyl mercury, and that was a great experience because it was a really complicated question that we were grappling with. It required people coming from lots of different disciplinary perspectives but I know that my work as a statistician — my modeling and so on — was really useful in helping the team come to the final conclusions.

And that work had real impact; I felt very good about that. The impact is very easy to see, so it’s tackling the real world problem directly, it’s forwarding the technical field itself, coming up with new methodologies, pushing those boundaries, but it’s also impact in terms of changing in the training the next generation.

>> CYNTHIA WHITCHURCH: So I’m a microbiologist, and I’m really interested in understanding how simple bacteria are able to do really complex multicellular activities.

As an undergraduate I really became very interested in microbiology and became fascinated by these little organisms, and I kinda figured that if we really want to understand the world we really need to understand how the simple things do what they do, and I had no idea that they would be as fascinating and as complex as they have proven to be.

So we use what we think of as bacterial zoos, where we look at what the bacteria are doing under the microscope, and what we found by following what the bacteria are doing in their live little zoos is that every now and then one member of the population will round up and explode, releasing little bits of its contents into that community for the use of all the other ones. So it’s a very altruistic behaviour of the bacteria.

It was the first time we’ve actually ever seen this process, and we found the process was different to what had been predicted in the literature, actually.

Understanding those processes, we may be able to come up with really novel and innovative approaches to find new ways of making antibiotics, or even without antibiotics actually doing some bacterial mind control where we can control the behaviour of the bacteria now that we understand how they coordinate their own behaviours.

>> MARTINA DOBLIN: My research focuses on the photosynthetic algae that sit at the base of marine food webs. We’re really interested in how these organisms are responding to natural changes as well as human-induced change in the environment.

The research is important because algae are at the base of marine food webs, and if they’re impacted by a sudden change in their environmental conditions there’s a domino effect that happens through the food web.

Algae also provide really important ecosystem services for humans. They transform nutrients and help clean up the ocean. They produce oxygen and remove CO2 from the surface of the ocean, and without those services the human population wouldn’t be sustained.

So we hope to achieve two things in the near term with this research.

One is to work with government to develop better monitoring systems to enable us to detect changes in coastal systems and also build their resilience, and that’s very important just for the sustainability of coastal populations in Australia.

And the second thing we want to do is take what we know about the natural system and use it to our advantage in artificial systems, for example in aquaculture production or in other industries where production of certain products might be advantageous.

For a long time, I’ve been translating the outcomes of our scientific research into coastal management policies, and also working with industries to improve outcomes for them.

I think it’s a really effective way to work. It’s provided us with research funding, but it adds meaning to the research itself, and it really allows us to make a difference.