Nanotechnology is beginning to pervade society, with the tiny particles finding their way into consumer products such as sunscreens, along with advanced materials, and technology used in ICT, catalysis, chemical and biological sensing and medical diagnosis. It is expected that within a decade, the international market for products embodying nanotechnology will be worth trillions of dollars a year. According to Dr Jämting, in this context it is important that we understand how factors such as temperature and humidity can influence the accuracy of tests that measure nanparticles.

Read ’sizing up the nanoworld‘

The 2009 presentation ceremony for the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science was held in the Great Hall, Parliament House in Canberra on 28th October 2009.

The annual Prizes are Australia’s celebration and recognition of excellence in both theoretical and practical applications of science and teaching that contribute to improving the standards of Australia’s present and future scientific capabilities and aspirations.

Prizes are awarded in five categories:
1.    Prime Minister’s Prize for Science
2.    Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year
3.    Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year
4.    Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools
5.    Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools

This year’s recipients of the awards are:

(L-R) Mr Allan Wittome, Mr Len Altman, Professor Michael Cowley, Dr Amanda Barnard, The Hon Kevin Rudd MP, Prime Minister of Australia, Dr John O’Sullivan, The Hon Senator Kim Carr, Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science & Research

Prime Minister’s Prize for Science: John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan, Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from the University of Sydney has won Australia’s greatest scientific honour, the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science 2009 for his many achievements in astronomy and wireless technologies.

This award recognises in particular his research into the reduction of atmospheric distortion of electromagnetic signals that contributed significantly to the development and commercialisation of the now ubiquitous technology that features within nearly every WiFi device and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) across the world making them both fast and reliable.

Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year: Michael Cowley

Dr. Michael Cowley has dedicated his career to understanding the contributing factors to a condition that affects nearly two and a half million Australians: obesity.  He is the creator of biotech company, Orexigen, which is currently trialling four obesity treatments that utilise his breakthrough knowledge of the effects of the hormone lepatin on the brain which has the ability to increase or decrease weight.

Dr. Cowley continues to work with colleagues at Monash University to develop therapies that break the relationship between obesity and increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year: Amanda Barnard

For Amanda Barnard great academic success of a first class honours degree followed by a PhD in Physics from RMIT University in 2003, have fuelled an already burgeoning career.

Specialising in the supercomputer study of nano-particle materials on a minute scale, Dr. Barnard defied peers when she created particles in the virtual world to test how their stability would be affected when interacting in various environments.  This work is vital as it reduces the risk and increases knowledge before the development of such particles in the real world.

Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools: Allan Wittome

The rural Badgingarra Primary School students of Allan Wittome understand science as an everyday part of their lives through the great enjoyment they receive from their teacher’s practical applications within and outside of the classroom.

They enjoy active participation in competitions, awards programs and community projects including the Earthwatch Teach Live Whale Sharks of Ningaloo. With Mr Wittome’s guidance and motivation, the students were the first primary school to partake in the F1 in Schools project that brings science off the page and into the imagination of the students.

Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools: Len Altman

The resurgence in Australian geoscience teaching emanates from Marden Senior College in South Australia, where Len Altman is continuing his 36 year teaching career guiding the academic and career paths of not only secondary schoolchildren, but also adult learners and recent immigrants.

Geoscience is needed not only for the mining and minerals industries, but is vital in understanding the challenges that lie ahead as a result of climate change particularly with regards to water security. Concerned with whole of life learning, Len Altman frequently organises multiple events and opportunities for students and teachers at all levels of education and led the creation of Geoscience Pathways, a website demonstrating the essential contribution of geoscience to modern society.

Please visit the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science website to find out more about the individual prizes and award recipients.

Professor Sackett recently sent a congratulatory video message to the Royal Institution of Australia, which opened in Adelaide on 8 October 2009.

The Royal Institution of Australia, which is the first international affiliate of London’s world renowned Royal Institution of Great Britain, aims to ‘bring science to the people and people to science’.  Please visit their website to find out more.

The only reliable way to find out whether the internal structures of an aircraft are corroded is to pull the plan apart and look.  But new nanotechnology-based techniques being developed by physicists including Professor Tanya Monro, of the University of Adelaide could make costly visual inspection in preventative aircraft maintenance a thing of the past.

SCIENCE AT THE BOUNDARIES

L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships

Professor Sackett recently sent a congratulatory video message to the winners of the L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships.

Globally L’Oreal’s support For Women in Science has three tiers:

1. $100,000 L’OREAL-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards -- awarded annually to five outstanding female scientists chosen across the world.
2. $40,000 UNESCO-L’OREAL Women in Science International Fellowships -- awarded annually to 15 young life scientists across the world.
3. $20,000 L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships -- awarded annually to three Australian scientists.

This year (2009) the L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships winners are:

• Tamara Davis, University of Queensland, Brisbane/University of Copenhagen
• Marnie Blewitt, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne
• Zenobia Jacobs, University of Wollongong

Zenobia Jacobs

University of Wollongong

Zenobia Jacobs wants to know where we came from, and how we got here. When did our distant ancestors leave Africa and spread across the world? Why? And when was Australia first settled?

These are difficult and controversial questions. But Zenobia has a deep understanding of time and how to measure it. She has developed a way of accurately dating when individual grains of sand were buried with human artefacts. And that technique is transforming our understanding of human evolution.

As a child growing up in the shadow of the Kruger National Park, Zenobia Jacobs was surrounded by archaeological artefacts ‘lying around’. At university she ‘fell in love’ with archaeology and became an expert in chronology.

She uses a dating technique known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). It relies on subtle changes in sand grains due to the decay of tiny amounts of radioactive elements present in all natural deposits. The energy of some of these reactions is stored and only released when light strikes the grain. If the sand is buried then the energy is trapped and can be released in Zenobia’s laboratory- revealing how long the sand, and the human artefacts it was associated with, were buried.

Zenobia has fine tuned OSL, turning it into a robust tool that she used to reveal the appearance and disappearance of communities at caves along the southern coastline of South Africa.

She found a community that had been living relatively sophisticated lives-harvesting shellfish and using ochre pigments for decoration-more than 160,000 years ago, about 120,000 years earlier than previously thought.

These studies also helped win Zenobia and her colleagues a US$2.5 million National Science Foundation grant in 2006 to develop a detailed archaeological, climate and environmental record for South Africa from 400,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Now her work has brought her to the University of Wollongong to work with Prof Bert Roberts, one of the team who discovered the Flores ‘hobbit’.

“Bert has done more than any other to develop single-grain OSL dating. It’s simply the best lab in the world for my work. I could not ask for more anywhere else.”

And settling in Australia has also allowed her to expand her work. Already she and Bert have used OSL to suggest that the giant marsupials of Tasmania became extinct within a few thousand years of human migration into the area via a land bridge about 43,000 years ago.

And now, with her $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship, she wants to track the movement of the Aboriginal people into and throughout Australia.

“It’s of incredible relevance to the whole ‘Out of Africa’ theory. When did our ancestors leave Africa? Why? Which routes did they chose and how quickly did they disperse?”

Background

Qualifications

2004                     PhD (Science), University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

1999                     Bachelor of Arts, Honours (Archaeology), University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

Career highlights, awards, fellowships and grants

2009                    Senior Research Fellow, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong

2008                    Australian Research Council grant: The future of palaeolimate and archaeological research in Australia: next generation instrumentation for chronology and environmental reconstruction

2008                    Vice Chancellor’s Emerging Researcher Award, University of Wollongong

2007                    Australian Research Council grant: A stable-isotope mass spectrometer for novel determinations of past temperatures

2006                   Australian Research Council grant: Out of Africa and into Australia: Robust chronologies for turning points in modern human evolution and dispersal

2006                   National Science Foundation (USA) HOMINID Grant: Palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental context of the origins of modern humans in South Africa: Constructing a detailed record from 400,000 – 30,000 years ago

2006 -2008          Research Fellow, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong

2003 -2005          Scientist, Environmentek, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa

2001-2003           British Council Overseas Research Student Scholarship for PhD studies in the UK

Research highlights

• 25 journal articles and reviews including 15 as first author, and two book chapters
• More than 30 presentations at Australian and international conferences and institutions including six invited conference presentations
• Part of the team whose discoveries at Blombos Cave, South Africa, have forced a reassessment of when and where Homo sapiens first developed modern behaviour
• In 2007, she co-authored a publication in Nature, reporting evidence that modern humans living 165,000 years ago along the southern Cape coast of South Africa had a far more complex lifestyle than seen anywhere else in the world at that time

For further detail on the L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships, please visit http://www.scienceinpublic.com/blog/category/loreal

Tamara Davis

University of Queensland/University of Copenhagen

In 1998 astronomers made an astonishing discovery-the expansion of the Universe is not happening at a steady rate, nor is it slowing down toward eventual collapse. Instead, it is accelerating. The discovery required a complete rethink of the standard model used to explain how the Universe works.

“Now we know that stars, planets, galaxies and all that we can see make up just four per cent of the Universe,” says Tamara Davis, a University of Queensland astrophysicist.

“About 23 per cent is dark matter. The balance is thought to be dark energy, which we know very little about.”

Tamara is on the hunt for this dark energy. By using the Australian National University’s new telescope SkyMapper to measure the movement of supernovae, she hopes to gain a better understanding of dark energy.

“Supernovae are extremely bright stellar explosions. Because we know how bright they are we can use them as ’standard candles’ to accurately measure distance and motion across the Universe,” Tamara says. “By measuring how fast supernovae are moving, and comparing that to what we expect based on current theories, we may be able to trace the dark matter and energy as well as the visible matter.”

And the SkyMapper telescope offers some unique opportunities for mapping the Universe.

“SkyMapper takes images that are 25 times larger than the full moon. This lets it scan the southern sky once every four days,” she says. “Only a few years ago it took the best telescopes a year to cover the same area. This allows us to look at a much bigger region of the nearby Universe, rather than zeroing in on single objects or distant galaxies.”

Using the SkyMapper data generated over the next couple of years, Tamara hopes to detect invisible dark matter by observing the effects of its gravity.

“We can use the motion of supernovae (not just their position) to measure the 3D distribution of all matter in the Universe, not just galaxies,” she explains. “This will allow us to measure previously unexplored properties of dark matter and dark energy.”

But a complicated study like this requires a lot of scientists with expertise in various areas from observational analysis to theoretical physics. Tamara plans to use her $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship to pull together an international team of scientists to work on this project.

And she has the runs on the board to do this. She’s already collaborated with many of the leaders in the field including Nobel Laureate George Smoot and Shaw and Gruber prize winners Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.

“I’ve been privileged enough to be a member of a number of fantastic teams in my career to date. The Fellowship gives me the chance to establish my own all-star team,” Tamara says.

Background

Qualifications

2004                      PhD (Astrophysics), University of New South Wales
(winner of best Science PhD from UNSW that year)

1999                      Bachelor of Science, First Class Honours (Physics and Astronomy), University of New South Wales

1999                      Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy), University of New South Wales

Career highlights, awards, fellowships and grants

2008                      Research Fellow, School of Mathematics and Physics,
University of Queensland

2008                       Associate Professor, Dark Cosmology Centre
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

2006-2007              Postdoctoral Fellow, Dark Cosmology Centre,
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

2005-2009              SuperNova Acceleration Probe team to develop a new space telescope for US Department of Energy/NASA

2004-2005              Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University

Research highlights

• 24 journal articles and reviews, including six as first author, and two book chapters that in total have over 1,000 citations
• Frequent visits to international laboratories to collaborate and learn new techniques (incl. Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Ctr, U. Chicago, Princeton, U. British Columbia, U. Copenhagen, U. Oslo, Imperial College London, Cambridge)
• Participated in the ESSENCE supernova survey which discovered over two hundred supernovae and used these to measure the changing expansion rate of the Universe. Used this data to rule out two of the leading alternative cosmological models based on quantum theories of gravity
• Jointly made the first unambiguous detection of time dilation due to the expanding Universe. This was cited amongst the journal Nature’s research highlights for August 2008
• With the Australian team WiggleZ’ making the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies in the Universe, in order to test new cosmological theories that explain dark energy

For further detail on the L’OREAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships, please visit http://www.scienceinpublic.com/blog/category/loreal