Archive for the 'Research' Category

Two leading marine ecologists have warned that, without strategic management, disease has the potential to threaten food security in tropical aquaculture.

Aquaculture is currently the fastest-growing food production industry in the world, and is rapidly replacing wild fisheries in supplying the world’s population with fish and shellfish. However, infectious disease continues to pose a major threat to aquaculture, where outbreaks of deadly pathogens can wipe out entire stocks and put a halt to food production.

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, Dr Tommy Leung (pictured here), a lecturer in parasitology and evolutionary biology at the University of New England, and Dr Amanda Bates, a Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, analyse the pattern of disease outbreaks in fish and shellfish farms around the world.

They have found that disease outbreaks on farms in tropical regions tend to have a more devastating impact than those at temperate regions. Not only do diseases in tropical regions result in greater losses of stock, they also progress more rapidly, leaving less time to take actions to either control or contain the outbreak.

They have also found that juvenile fish and shellfish are more vulnerable to pathogens than adult fish, and disease outbreak in shellfish generally progress more rapidly than in fish populations.

They say that, in conditions where warming occurs – such as El Niño cycles or climate change – increases in the incidence of pathogen outbreaks have the potential to exacerbate the progression and intensity of disease outbreaks.

Dr Leung and Dr Bates recommend taking disease vulnerability into account as a key consideration when designing and managing aquaculture, and that strategies for adapting aquaculture for future climate change must involve infrastructure for disease monitoring and control.

Anne Pender, Associate Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England, will be travelling to Spain later this week for an international conference at which her latest book will be launched.

The conference, at the University of Barcelona in the second week of December, is being held in honour of the book’s co-author, Emeritus Professor Bruce Bennett AO, who died in April this year.

The book – From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012 – analyses the impact of living in Britain on the work of 49 Australian authors. It starts with the work of William Charles Wentworth, who published his Description of the Colony of New South Wales (1819), the first book published by an Australian, and his epic poem Australasia (1823), during a 15-year residence in England.

“For some Australian authors, especially those who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a sense of wanting to be at the centre of literary life that took them to the United Kingdom,” Dr Pender said. “There was also a desire to explore, while in Britain, the European literary heritage of Australia. In detail, the motivation differed for each of the authors we investigated; there’s no common pattern – and it certainly wasn’t a feeling for ‘the Empire’. Many of them found that the British publishing climate was favourable for their work; some were better known in Britain than in Australia.”

“Not all of the successful authors came back to Australia,” she said, “but those who did include Patrick White, Christina Stead and Morris West. While Patrick White felt he needed to come back to connect with the essence of his Australian childhood, Germaine Greer declared in 2003 that ‘diaspora is the true human environment, and homeland a murderous delusion’.

“We’ve tried to unravel the myth that they all wanted to live and work in London. Some have chosen to live elsewhere: the novelist M. J. Hyland in Manchester, for example, and others as far from London as Scotland and Cornwall.”

From a Distant Shore, by Bruce Bennett and Anne Pender, is published by Monash University Publishing. Bruce Bennett was an internationally recognised authority on Australian literature, and the organisers of the conference in his honour – titled “Looking Back to Look Forwards” – have invited eminent academics from around the world to participate. A special issue of Coolabah, the journal of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, produced in conjunction with the Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia, was published this week in memory of Professor Bennett.

Dr Pender’s contribution to the conference will be a paper on Australian actors in the “Asia Pacific Century”, including a discussion of international ventures such as the films Mao’s Last Dancer and The Home Song Stories. The holder of a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to investigate the careers of Australian actors who have opted to stay and work in Australia, Dr Pender is the author of Christina Stead: Satirist (2002), Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright (2008), and One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries (2010).

A young researcher at UNE has won a national award for her work on suicide prevention among some of the most marginalised members of society.

Dr Kathy McKay was presented with a Suicide Prevention Australia LIFE Award at the Annual National Suicide Prevention Conference in Sydney last month.

Dr McKay (pictured here), who is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at UNE, won the LIFE Award for Emerging Research. Focusing on community-based programs for suicide prevention, she has been working for the past two years on the development and evaluation of a youth suicide prevention program in Western Australia called “Alive and Kicking Goals”. The program, initiated, managed and led by Indigenous people in the Kimberley, aims to reduce the high suicide rate among young Indigenous people in and around Broome through the use of football and peer education.

Dr McKay moved to UNE earlier this year to join the team of researchers in the newly-established Collaborative Research Network (CRN) for Mental Health and Well-being in Rural and Regional Communities. While continuing her work with “Alive and Kicking Goals”, she is also conducting research – together with her CRN project leader, Associate Professor Myfanwy Maple – on suicide prevention, intervention and postvention among marginalised communities, and the broader mental health and well-being of rural populations through CRN projects such as the recently-launched Rural Outreach Mental Health and Resilience (ROMHAR) study.

She remarked on “the amazingly positive atmosphere” in the CRN, where she is able to pursue her own ideas for research in a collaborative environment.

“A lot of the work I do is with Indigenous people and people from other marginalised groups who don’t have a voice,” she said. “I hope my LIFE Award raises some awareness of the suicide problem within such groups.”

She said she felt honoured that people had taken the time to nominate her for the LIFE Award. “It’s wonderful to be recognised by people I admire – and am blessed to be working with,” she said.

An Australia-wide survey led from the University of New England is contributing to the international Interest and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) project funded by the European Commission.

A team of researchers from six Australian universities, led by UNE’s Dr Terry Lyons and Dr Frances Quinn, surveyed 3,500 first-year science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students at 30 universities around the nation. Supported by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, the project aimed to find out what motivates students to take STEM courses and whether their experiences of these courses meet expectations.

The project report, Starting Out in STEM, was published last week. It can be downloaded from www.une.edu.au/simerr.

The survey found a high level of satisfaction with many aspects of STEM courses, but also some criticism of the quality of teaching – particularly in a number of Group of Eight (G8) universities. Only 46 per cent of students agreed that they received timely feedback from lecturers, and just over 50 per cent that their lecturers cared whether they learnt anything or not. Students from a number of G8 universities were among the most critical of these aspects of teaching.

UNE students in the sciences were more positive than most – a result consistent with the high level of satisfaction with science courses by UNE graduates reported in The Good Universities Guide for 2013. While UNE is one of only eight Australian universities awarded top ranking (“five stars”) by the Guide for teaching quality across all its courses, it is one of only six universities awarded top ranking for teaching quality in the sciences.

“The study had a particular focus on the decisions and experiences of young women in male-dominated STEM courses such as physics, IT and engineering,” Dr Lyons said. “This is because Australia does not rank highly among OECD countries in the proportion of STEM university qualifications awarded to women.

“We found no evidence, however, that females in these courses felt discriminated against by male students or lecturers. In general, females were as positive as males about most aspects of these courses and did not appear to be adversely affected by their minority status.”

He said data from the survey indicated that the most potent motivation for taking STEM courses was personal interest – sustained by good secondary-school teachers who highlight the practical applications of learning. “Consistent with other studies, we found that teachers were considered by students to be more important in their decisions than parents, friends, siblings or careers advisers,” Dr Lyons said. “Females in particular tended to regard personal encouragement from teachers as having been important in their decisions.”

The authors of Starting Out in STEM are Terry Lyons, Frances Quinn and Nadya Rizk (UNE), Neil Anderson (James Cook University), Peter Hubber and Jan West, (Deakin University), John Kenny (University of Tasmania), Len Sparrow (Curtin University), and Sue Wilson (Australian Catholic University). For more information contact Dr Terry Lyons at terry.lyons@une.edu.au or on (02) 6773 2983.

Gail Hawkes, a sociologist at the University of New England, was a young woman in the sexually liberated “swinging ’60s” of the twentieth century. Now she’s talking to women of her generation about their experiences of sexuality as they journey into their own 60s and beyond.

Realising that she was participating in what she calls “a unique historical moment”, Dr Hawkes (pictured here) initiated a collaborative research project aimed at elucidating the significance of that “moment”.

Working with Professor Victor Minichiello and other colleagues at UNE, and the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, she is talking to women and asking them: “How does it feel to turn 60 when you’re the product of the “swinging ‘60s”? The Australian Research Council is funding the project.

“It was my pet idea,” she said, “but I didn’t know whether we were on the right track or not. I think now that we are – there’s been such huge enthusiasm from women. The picture that’s emerging is that women of the ‘post pill’ generation, because their experience of sexuality was so different from their mothers’ experience, don’t fit into any pre-established model. They’ve had to be very creative in their personal lives – and they’re surprisingly willing to talk about this.”

The project, titled “Sexual well-being and ageing: a study of older Australian women”, is the first study of the sexuality of older women to focus on this significant group. “The aim is to use women’s own experiences and feelings to build our understanding of the complex relationships between ageism, sexism and sexual subjectivity, and develop a conceptual framework that advances our understanding of sex and sexuality in older women,” Dr Hawkes said.  “We’re inviting women aged between 55 and 86 to get in touch and share their experiences with us.”

After talking on the ABC Radio National program Life Matters early last week, Dr Hawkes received more than 60 e-mail responses from women wanting to be involved. The segment, titled “Swinging 60s turn 60: Are they still feeling sexy?”, was so popular that she was invited back to the program for a one-hour talkback segment last Friday.

Participation in the project involves a one-off interview, which will take between one and one-and-a-half hours.  “We will be talking to participants using a relaxed approach,” Dr Hawkes said. “There will be a series of open-ended questions that will allow women to explore their experiences and feelings about ageing and sexual well-being. We will also ask them to keep a personal journal for two weeks, starting after the interview. The findings from this project will allow for the integration of sexual well-being into the broader health and well-being agenda for the fast-expanding ageing population in Australia. The research findings will create an important public debate, changing and promoting attitudes that validate the sexual lives of women in general and older women in particular.”

The project has established a blog at http://blog.une.edu.au/sexualityandageing/. Dr Hawkes can be contacted on 02 6773 2277 or on ghawkes@une.edu.au and all interested women are invited to contact her.

An event at the University of New England last month marked the beginning of a new era of research on the plants of north-eastern NSW and the University of New England’s contribution to botany.

It was the launch of database software that gives flexible online access to the huge collection of plant specimens in UNE’s N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium.

The Director of the Herbarium, Professor Jeremy Bruhl, together with a team of volunteers, has been working on the database software with the eResearch organisation Intersect Australia Ltd over the past 18 months.

Professor Bruhl explained that the herbarium contained well over 85,000 pressed and dried plant specimens – including the “type specimens” that anchor the application of names as cited in the original publications. Some of the specimens in “Herbarium NE” (the international code for the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium) dated back as far as the nineteenth century, he said.

UNE’s herbarium, he continued, was one of the first in the world to begin the process of cataloguing its collection in a computer database – a process it began in about 1987.

With the establishment in 1999 of Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (AVH) as part of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), researchers had online access to data from Australia’s State and National herbaria. Recognising the significance of that innovation, UNE became a leader in the movement to include university-based herbaria in the AVH database – a movement that has borne fruit in Intersect projects at UNE, the University of Wollongong and Southern Cross University.

Professor Bruhl said that Herbarium NE records should be delivered within the next few weeks to AVH and ALA, and members of the public and researchers would be able to search for any genus or species of plant, and look at the records or maps of distribution. They would also be able to filter the records to display just those from Herbarium NE, he said. Some background to the herbarium is available online at http://www.une.edu.au/herbarium/, and those wishing to request access to the new NE database can do so at http://www.une.edu.au/herbarium/herbarium-ne-database/.

An important aspect of the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium software is that staff members, students, and colleagues collecting specimens for the herbarium or needing to lodge voucher specimens for their research can enter data from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection rather than from just one dedicated terminal at UNE. The software also ensures consistency of nomenclature and various other fields, thus enhancing the quality and integrity of the data. Users can search the database by using names of plants, names of collectors, or other text strings, or by specifying such temporal or spatial parameters as collection dates or areas.

The software launch was the prelude to an eResearch Open Day. Organised by Johan Boshoff, an eResearch analyst from Intersect based at UNE, the Open Day introduced UNE researchers to the services that Intersect can offer them.

Dr Ian Gibson, Chief Executive Officer of Intersect, said that the aim of the not-for-profit company was “to build systems that lead to better research outcomes”. “That’s why we’re so pleased to be part of the herbarium project,” he continued.

Clicking on the AVH logo image displayed above reveals a photograph of (from left) Gordon White (co-establisher of the 1980s database), Professor Jeremy Bruhl, and some of the volunteers who worked on the database:  Jon Burne, Phil Rose, and Ian Telford (the Herbarium Curator).

A large-scale biological, medical and social study of mental health in rural and regional Australia has just begun at the University of New England.

The study is being conducted through the Collaborative Research Network (CRN) for Mental Health and Well-being in Rural and Regional Communities, funded with the help of a $4.8 million grant from the Australian Government and launched at UNE earlier this year.

Known as ROMHAR (“Rural Outreach Mental Health and Resilience”), the interdisciplinary study will collect data on a wide range of variable factors associated with mental health in the general community.

The project leaders, Professor Chris Sharpley and Associate Professor Myfanwy Maple, said that the incidence of depression and suicide was higher in rural than in urban communities, highlighting the importance of this kind of research.

The UNE researchers will ask voluntary participants in the project to answer a detailed questionnaire, and to donate samples of saliva and blood for laboratory analysis. “We’ll be trying to identify molecules that might be reliable indicators of depression,” said Dr Linda Agnew, a cellular immunologist working at UNE. “This will enable us to test several current hypotheses linking genetic, immunological and endocrinal data with some of the medical, psychological and social factors involved in mental illness.”

The researchers need to collect information from people who are very healthy through to those who have experienced mental health difficulties. “Therefore, anyone in the community who is over 18 years of age is welcome to participate,” Dr Maple said. “It is particularly important that we include people with good mental health as well as those who have had difficulties.”

The project is being launched in New England, but there are plans to extend it to rural sites in Victoria,
Queensland and Western Australia.

The Government funding has enabled the recruitment of a number of researchers and the purchase of new equipment at UNE, and the development of collaborative links with other universities. Professor Sharpley said that the multidisciplinary nature of the data to be collected would make the ROMHAR study unique in Australia.

People interested in participating, or in obtaining more information on the study, can contact the Project Administrator, Kerri Fitzpatrick, on (02) 6773 3700 and leave a message, or e-mail ROMHAR@une.edu.au.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) is funding researchers at the University of New England to investigate how energy producers and consumers are adapting to the carbon tax.

The $500,000 research grant to UNE follows the University’s successful completion earlier this year of an ARC-funded project that modelled the impact of the carbon tax – predicting a significant reduction in carbon emissions accompanied by only a small reduction in gross domestic product.

Professor Mahinda Siriwardana, the economist from the UNE Business School who led the earlier project, is now leading its successor, which has just begun. UNE’s industry partner in the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant is the major energy company AGL Energy Limited.

Professor Siriwardana is an authority on the sophisticated “computable general equilibrium” method of predictive modelling that was so effective in the previous project. Using data from AGL, and from surveys of households in rural and regional Australia, he intends to use a similar approach in modelling the relevant behaviour of energy producers and consumers now that the tax has been introduced.

“The most probable outcome is that energy producers will continue to move away from carbon-based energy sources and towards low-emission sources of energy such as wind farms and solar panels,” Professor Siriwardana said. “Nobody’s sure at the moment about the costs and benefits of such a move, as the establishment of wind farms and solar panels is capital-intensive. But if they don’t respond to the carbon tax in that way, the emission levels will not decline, and a higher burden will be placed on consumers to modify their energy use in response to higher prices.

“Using AGL as an example, and monitoring adjustments to its energy production and distribution strategies, we’ll be able to model the effects of changing energy sources on the profitability of such companies as they respond to the carbon tax. AGL is already Australia’s largest owner and operator of renewable energy assets, including wind farms and solar power, and it’s very interested in the development of our model, which will produce both short-term and long-term predictions.”

“We also want to study the impact of the carbon tax in relation to income distribution,” he said, “and develop models of compensation for low-income households.”

Professor Siriwardana’s five fellow-researchers on the project include Dr Judith McNeill, Dr Ian Reeve and Dr Xianming Meng from UNE’s Institute for Rural Futures and two researchers – Professor Paul Simshauser and Tim Nelson – from AGL.

Clicking on the image displayed above reveals a photograph of Professor Mahinda Siriwardana (seated) and Dr Xianming Meng.

The School of Humanities at the University of New England will throw open its doors to the public next week during a week-long “Humanities Research Expo”. On offer will be lectures, presentations, and a “great debate” – all open to the public and free of charge.

On Tuesday, September 18, at 4pm in Arts Lecture Theatre A2, staff from the school will argue the topic “Why Our Discipline Is The Best” in a debate that promises to be “fun, fancy, and just a little fanatic”, according to Dr Bronwyn Hopwood, the organiser of the event and a lecturer in Roman History in the School of Humanities.

This will be followed by a free Political and International Studies public lecture delivered by Dr Tim Battin on ‘The Future of Social Democracy’ at 6pm in Arts Lecture Theatre A2.

At 6pm on Wednesday, September 19, in Arts Lecture Theatre A2, the annual Russel Ward Public Lecture will be delivered by Emerita Professor Jill Roe on ‘Revisiting the Frontier: from Miles Franklin’s Brindabella to South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula’’.

At 6pm on Thursday, September 20, Dr Paul Roche from the University of Sydney will give a talk on ‘Lucan’s Supernatural’ in the Aspects of Antiquity Lecture Series held in The Gallery at Earle Page College.

Finally, on Friday, September 21, at 9.30am in Arts Lecture Theatre A3, Dr Hopwood will present a talk in the School of Humanities Seminar Series: “What’s In A Name? Appian and the Nomenclature of Oktaouios Kaisar”.

Dr Hopwood said this was the first year the School of Humanities had run such an “all-in-one” expo, and that she hoped the format would be popular with the public as well as with students and staff.

“We normally have workshops every year, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase some of our research as well as to provide those workshops.”

As well as this the public events, information sessions will run throughout the week on the School of Humanities’ research projects, honours, MA, MPhil and PhD programs, the skills required for thesis writing, conference presentations, applying for scholarships, grants, and awards, and for academic publishing in general. Current students will also give presentations of their ongoing research.

A full programme of events is available from Dr Bronwyn Hopwood: bhopwood@une.edu.au.

Earth scientists from the University of New England were prominent participants in the “Geology Olympics” – the 34th International Geological Congress (IGC), held in Brisbane at the time of the Olympics in London.

The IGC, held every four years, is the world’s largest gathering of geologists. And this year’s Congress, hosted by Australia and attracting more than 5,000 delegates from 112 countries, was the largest geology meeting ever held in Australia.

Titled “Unearthing our Past and Future”, the 2012 IGC ran from the 5^th to the 10^th of August at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The UNE delegates presented three Keynote addresses and many other papers, on topics ranging from the vanished islands of Fiji and the effects of sea-level change on island societies, to the lost oceans of Tibet and the discovery of huge, complex eyes in the fossilised remains of an early arthropod.

Ian Metcalfe, an Adjunct Professor in UNE’s School of Environmental and Rural Science, was one of only a handful of geologists at the Congress who delivered more than one invited Keynote address. In one of these, Professor Metcalfe presented the results of his research over the past 30 years on the formation of the South-east Asian continental crust. And in the other, written in collaboration with several other scientists, he reported on the dating of volcanic ash layers in eastern Australia using precise uranium-lead dating techniques. This is enabling the calibration of climate-change events more than 240 million years ago.

Altogether, Professor Metcalfe was author or co-author of nine presentations at the Congress.

Dr John Paterson from the School of Environmental and Rural Science was invited to present a Keynote address on discoveries, in the Emu Bay Shale of Kangaroo Island, of the well-preserved fossilised remains of soft-bodied animals from the Cambrian period. He was also the co-author of two other related papers at the Congress.

Dr Paterson was the first author of a recent publication in the leading international journal Nature documenting the discovery of complex eyes in the huge marine predator Anomalocaris that roamed the seas more than 500 million years ago.

Professor Patrick Nunn, Head of UNE’s School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, presented a paper on the effects of climate-driven sea-level change on island societies, using examples from the Fiji Islands during a period 700 to 600 years ago. Professor Nunn was also the co-author of several other papers. And Dr Alan Baxter from the School of Environmental and Rural Science spoke about fossils found in deep-marine sediments from two ancient oceans in Tibet. He was also co-author of two poster papers on Tibetan geology, presented with colleagues from the University of Sydney and the Tibetan Geological Survey.