Archive for the 'Staff' 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).

Dr Paul McDonald, a lecturer in animal behaviour at the University of New England, has been honoured with one of this year’s Young Tall Poppy Science Awards for NSW.

Dr McDonald (pictured here) is the only representative of a regional university among the nine young scientists presented with these awards during a ceremony at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney late last month.

The award, by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS), recognises Dr McDonald’s ability to conduct excellent scientific research and to communicate his findings – and his love of zoological science – to a wide and varied audience. “All the awardees recognise the importance of scientific research and the more important goal of ensuring all society benefits from their shared knowledge,” said Camille Thomson, Acting Executive Director of AIPS.

As the recipient of a Young Tall Poppy Science Award, Dr McDonald will be visiting schools and attending seminars to engage with students, teachers, parents and the broader community as part of the AIPS Tall Poppy Campaign.

“Dr McDonald’s research seeks to understand both how and why animals cooperate,” his award citation reads. “He uses Noisy and Bell Miners – birds that live in complex societies similar to those of humans – as ideal model species for his research.”

“Paul takes advantage of the public’s interest in birds to engage with them about his research into animal behaviour,” the citation continues. “He is curator of the Zoology Museum at UNE, managing visits from school groups and private visitors. He has also regularly prepared articles for the media, both newspaper and radio, as well as presenting to groups from Birdlife Australia and the Victorian Ornithological Research Group.

“I’ve always been interested in animals – and birds in particular,” Dr McDonald said. “There are just so many unanswered questions in animal behaviour – and answering one question usually gives rise to several more.

His work with Miners is enabling him to address some of these questions. Earlier this year he published research results showing that individual birds within a Noisy Miner colony can discriminate among the calls of individuals – even individuals from a distant colony. “Their ability to attend to information encoded in their calls could contribute to the complexity of their social organisation,” he said. “The more we look at these species, the more we realise just how complex their society actually is.”

His research into the cooperative behaviour of Miners has broad ecological implications. For example, together with one of his postgraduate research students he’s investigating the contribution of Bell Miners to the phenomenon of forest dieback. The aggressive Miners can exclude other birds from forested areas – birds that eat the parasites responsible for dieback.

Having young children of his own, Paul McDonald is used to answering children’s questions about animals and birds and is looking forward to more contact with school groups. “I love working with kids and seeing how they’re thinking,” he said. “You’re never sure what questions are going to come.” He’ll be answering many of those questions in the year ahead.

Clicking on the photograph of Dr Paul McDonald displayed above reveals a photograph of him taken during the Young Tall Poppy Science Awards ceremony.

A public lecture in Armidale next week will inform people about the challenges facing the law in its efforts to keep pace with twenty-first-century technological innovations.

Mark Perry (pictured here), newly arrived in Armidale as a Professor of Law at the University of New England, is particularly well qualified to provide significant insights into this process. With academic qualifications in computer science as well as in the law, and extensive experience in both of those fields at universities around the world, he has been conducting research on what he calls “the nexus of technology and the law” for more than 15 years.

His Inaugural Lecture, introducing him as a UNE Professor to the University and Armidale communities, will be at 6.30 pm in the Armidale Town Hall on Wednesday 7 November. The title of the lecture is “Law meets science”.

“When the law meets science,” Professor Perry said, “most lawyers and policy makers don’t understand the science and most scientists don’t understand the law. I conducted a survey of 100 researchers – most of them in Europe – and found that their knowledge of intellectual property and contractual issues was minimal.”

Mark Perry’s professorship at UNE has come after a 13-year succession of senior academic positions at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. During that time he developed a specialised interest in patent law as it applies to advances in biotechnology – a celebrated instance being Canada’s legal battle over the patenting of the genetically engineered “Harvard mouse” used in cancer research. In a 2001 issue of the European Intellectual Property Review, Professor Perry and his biologist partner, Dr Priti Krishna, published their insights into the Harvard mouse case in an article titled “Making sense of mouse tales”.

In recent weeks Dr Krishna has joined Professor Perry in Armidale, where she has taken up a position at UNE as an Associate Professor of molecular biology.

In rural New England Professor Perry will be particularly interested in legal aspects of the use of biotechnology in agriculture, and has in fact just written a paper on the legal implications of the detection of genetically-modified genes in “GM-free” crops. “We’re getting so good at detecting these genes that they’re appearing everywhere,” he said. “And how should the law deal with that? Science keeps moving forward, while policy and legal frameworks don’t keep up with them. In the case of GM genes in agricultural products I think we have to face the inevitable – and the international consensus appears to be that we should have done so years ago. The idea might be to ignore the presence of GM genetic material at levels of less than 1 per cent providing the product has been approved somewhere.”

“Agriculture is changing with the development of new technologies,” he said. “This is likely to become more important because of climate change, and people need to be aware of the issues involved so that they can at least influence the direction in which it goes.”

Mark Perry is co-editor of the book Knowledge Policy for the 21^st Century: Legal Perspectives, published in Canada last year by Irwin Law. He has recently been heavily involved in a Genome Canada project researching the ethical, economic, environmental, legal and social aspects of using a genomics approach to pest management.

The lecture on Wednesday 7 November will be followed by drinks and canapés, and everyone is welcome. People planning to attend the event can notify the organisers (to help with catering arrangements) by e-mailing events@une.edu.au by Monday 5 November.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Professor Mark Perry displayed above expands to include Dr Priti Krishna.

The University of New England is a sponsor, once again, of the heritage writing and bush poetry competitions that are held on the first weekend of the annual Land of the Beardies Festival at Glen Innes.

This year’s competitions, on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 November, are to be judged by representatives of UNE’s arts research centre Arts New England.

The New England Heritage in Verse Competition, on Saturday, invites writers from the New England region to read an original piece of verse or prose on a topic of cultural and/or heritage significance to the region.

“New England prides itself on its historical memory,” said one of the judges – Dr Tom Bristow, a lecturer in English at UNE. “These writings will be judged in terms of the depth of research and the accuracy in documenting a historical incident.”

The other judge will be Dr Robert Hayworth, a former UNE lecturer who is an expert on the geology, vegetation and ornithology of the region. The organisers are planning to compile a number of the competition entries in a local publication.

Dr Bristow and Dr Hayworth will also judge the Bush Poetry Competition on the following day, and a written Children’s Poetry Competition. The children’s competition has a farming theme in 2012, the “Year of the Farmer”. “The original poetry by our young people should provide us with fresh views on the role of farming in Australia’s past, present and future,” Dr Bristow said. He added that, to illustrate the bond of poetry across the generations, the winners of the children’s competition would be presenting the winners of the Bush Poetry Competition with their awards.

The Bush Poetry Competition is conducted under the auspices of the Australian Bush Poetry Association Inc. “Bush poetry is a form of verse that is characteristically colloquial, colourful, direct, and of local meaning,” Dr Bristow said. “It has moved from an emphasis on rural life in colonial times to a broader understanding of bush experience in Australia’s history and its cultural significance in the present.”

Public readings in the New England Heritage in Verse Competition and the Bush Poetry Competition will begin at 9 am on both days in the Land of the Beardies Festival Social Club Hall, East Avenue, Glen Innes. The readings on Sunday will be preceded by the Poets’ Breakfast at 8 am.

“The competitions are held in public to both entertain the local community and sustain the historical memory of the region,” Dr Bristow said. “UNE’s participation in these events continues the University’s long tradition of fostering and recording the culture of the central area of the Tablelands.”

More information on the Land of the Beardies Festival, including competition entry forms, is available at: http://www.beardiesfestival.com.

The Australian Society of Agronomists (ASA) has named the University of New England’s Professor Graeme Blair as one of its inaugural Fellows.

Professor Blair and two others were honoured with this award during the 16^th Biennial Australian Agronomy Conference, held at UNE this week. The other recipients were Professor Walter Stern, founding Head of the Department of Agronomy at the University of Western Australia, and Professor Ted Wolfe, a UNE graduate and former Head of the School of Agriculture at Charles Sturt University.

The Fellowships, inaugurated at the ASA’s previous conference in 2010, were awarded this year for the first time. They are awarded “for important contributions to agronomy – including laboratory and field research, development, extension and administration – and to support the careers of Fellows”.

Graeme Blair, the current President of the ASA, is an Adjunct Professor in UNE’s School of Environmental and Rural Science. The citation accompanying the award mentions his “life-long commitment to agronomic research and teaching – particularly in plant-soil relationships – at the highest national and international level”.

“He has developed an international reputation – particularly in the area of mineral nutrition of pastures and crops – by using innovative experimental techniques combined with a great capacity to develop creative insights through both empirical and modelling approaches,” the citation continues. “Throughout his career Graeme has aimed to obtain a deeper understanding of soil fertility, plant nutrition, and the relationships between them – culminating in the development of the KCI-40 sulfur soil test, which is used in all major soil testing laboratories in Australia.”

The citation celebrates Professor Blair’s “major role in training the next generation of agricultural scientists,” and concludes: “Graeme has always challenged – and been challenged – in his research and teaching career, and all who have been part of the many challenges are richer for the experience.”

The ASA awards its Donald Medal (in honour of the celebrated agricultural scientist Professor C.M. Donald) to “an eminent agriculturalist who has retired or is close to retirement”. Dr Brian Dear, a recently retired research agronomist at the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI), is this year’s recipient. Dr Dear graduated in rural science from UNE before embarking on his distinguished, 40-year career as a pasture agronomist. At the time of his retirement he was a Senior Principal Research Scientist within DPI.

This year the ASA, in conjunction with its industry sponsors, awarded eight travel bursaries to tertiary students to enable them to attend the conference, with several of these going to UNE students. In addition, and in recognition of 2012 as the Year of the Farmer, the ASA in conjunction with Landmark instigated a Young Farmer Award to assist a farmer under the age of 35 to attend the conference. The recipient was James Symonds, a farmer from Willow Tree, who said the award had enabled him to find out about “the cutting edge in agronomy” and to get an idea of “where things are going internationally”.

ASA Young Agronomist Awards went to Loretta Serafin, an agronomist with the NSW DPI in
Tamworth, and Dr James Hunt, a research scientist in agronomy with CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra.

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed above expands to show Professor Graeme Blair with Amy Cosby, one of the UNE students who received an ASA bursary to attend the conference.

Thirty-four students at the University of New England have created works of art in one of the most revered of Chinese artistic traditions.

They have done so after practising the art of Chinese calligraphy for just three months.

“I’m so proud to be the teacher of these talented people,” said Dr Shi Li, a lecturer in Chinese at UNE.

Dr Li is continuing the work of a former UNE lecturer, Dr Cuncun Wu, who initiated the teaching of Chinese calligraphy at the University. In talking about the cross-cultural appeal of the art form, he pointed out that the majority of the students were of non-Chinese background, and that the best of the works had come from among them. “So Chinese background doesn’t matter,” he said.

And knowledge of the Chinese language is not essential either, as half of the calligraphy students are not students of Chinese.

The most important thing, said Dr Li, is emotional equanimity. “If your breathing isn’t calm you can’t hold the brush steadily,” he said. And in fostering such equanimity, the practice of calligraphy “nurtures the soul and heart”, he explained.

In officially opening an exhibition of the students’ work, Professor Darryl Poulsen, Head of UNE’s School of Arts, emphasised the “aesthetic appeal” of Chinese calligraphy, and pointed out that UNE was one of only very few universities in Australia teaching the art.

For one of the students – Ishtar Welstead – its aesthetic appeal was one of the aspects of calligraphy that attracted her. And, as a student of Japanese, many of the characters were familiar to her.

She also mentioned the importance of the physical and emotional aspects of the art. “It might surprise you just how much control is involved,” she said.

It could be the beginning of a journey of discovery for Ishtar. “I believe I can continue doing calligraphy into the future,” she said.

The students have painted – and chiselled – their Chinese characters onto a variety of materials, including cards, scrolls, leaves and rocks. Frithjof Herb, for example, has chiselled the characters for “family” into a large rock that he discovered on his family’s property, and Trent Barker has painted characters onto one of the stones that he and his father collected to build their house.

Clicking on the image of calligraphy by Tomoko Takahata displayed here reveals a photograph including the work of Frithjof Herb (centre), Trent Barker (front left) and Joshua Skow (front right).

Xanthe Mallett hopes that her appearance on Australian television screens as the forensic anthropologist presenting History Cold Case will inspire young people to explore the problem-solving power of science.

Dr Mallett (pictured here), now a lecturer in criminology at the University of New England, is a well-known personality to millions of people in the UK, where two series of the popular documentary program have appeared on BBC television.

She moved from the UK to Australia early this year to take up her lecturing position at UNE.

History Cold Case shows how the study of centuries-old human remains using modern forensic science techniques can illuminate history by giving a face – and even a name – to people long dead and often forgotten. “When their faces are reconstructed we can at least give them back their identity in that sense,” Dr Mallett said. “And sometimes, using historical records, we can get down to a possible name.”

The four episodes of History Cold Case are being broadcast on Thursdays at 8.30 pm on the BBC Knowledge Channel, with the second episode going to air this week (Thursday 11 October). This is the second series of History Cold Case; Series 1, made in 2010, has already been broadcast in Australia.

Dr Mallett, who is also the presenter of a forensic archaeology series called The Decryptors made for the National Georgraphic Channel, sees her work for television as part of the “public outreach” side of her work in science. “I want to engage people with science,” she said, “and in the UK I did a lot of work with schools and colleges.” She has continued with this at UNE, where she has conducted practical, science-based activities with visiting groups of schoolchildren.

Before coming to UNE Dr Mallett was a lecturer in the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee in Scotland. While there she was engaged in criminal investigation case work that involved analysing images of child sex abuse found on mobile phones to determine whether or not the owner of the phone was the perpetrator of the abuse. This developed her broader research interest in child sex abuse – particularly the use of the Internet as a distribution mechanism between groups of people involved in child pornography.

“Child sex abuse is a huge problem globally,” she said, “and it’s something we need to tackle head-on by overcoming our reluctance to talk about it.”

At UNE she has already taught a course on the Australian criminal justice system – a tall order for someone newly arrived in this country. But, with her background in the British criminal justice system, she was able to bring fresh perspectives – comparative and historical – to the task.

And next year she will introduce a course on transnational and organised crime to UNE’s criminology degree program, as well as teaching forensic science.

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.

Students from the University of New England have helped members of a remote Indigenous community in the Tiwi Islands to manage the health of their dogs.

Accompanied by their lecturer, Dr Wendy Brown, a team of four UNE students visited the Wurrumiyanga community on Bathurst Island for seven days last month and participated in a dog health program.

This followed two visits to the Tiwi Islands by Dr Brown earlier in the year – during the first of which she took part in an annual veterinary visit to the community. “The task was overwhelming,” she said. “We were to provide veterinary care for all the dogs on the island, with a focus on de-sexing and parasite control. The large population of free-roaming dogs created many health and environmental problems for the human and canine inhabitants, and all we could do in the two-day visit was really just a ‘band-aid’.”

As a result of this visit, and in collaboration with AMRRIC (Animal Management in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities) and the Darwin-based veterinarian Stephen Cutter, she proposed a four-day dog health program at Wurrumiyanga, partly funded by UNE.  “We recognised that the dog population could be stabilised only if we could de-sex a greater number of dogs than can be done in just two days a year,” she said. “The Tiwi Islands Council responded with an acceptance of our proposal, and an invitation to run the dog health program on Bathurst Island immediately prior to the Tiwi Islands’ Milimika Festival so that we could join in the festival activities.

“From my perspective, the aim was both to assist with the island’s dog management problem and to provide an opportunity for UNE students to gain valuable work – and life – experience.”

In preparation, Dr Brown assisted with the training of Indigenous Animal Management Workers employed by Tiwi Islands Shire Council who would be assisting in the dog health program. Then, just under a month later, she was back on Bathurst Island with four UNE students – Chantal Petrosi, Jaya Matthews, Tabitha Francis and Jessica Sparkes – joining Stephen Cutter and two other veterinarians from AMRRIC to conduct the program.

“We were really well accepted by the community,” Dr Brown said, “and the key people were very supportive. They had already conducted a dog census – a good sign that they’re engaging. And the program worked so well that we’re planning more visits. I think it’s the beginning of a long-term relationship for UNE.”

“We all stayed on and enjoyed the three-day festival that followed,” she said. “The people are open and friendly, and their warm welcome made us feel very much part of the community. The festival was a showcase of art and culture – including performance art – and the contribution of our dog health team to the festival was to man a stall providing dog-washing, face-painting and colouring-in.”

Chantal Petrosi, one of the four UNE students (and pictured here with one of the dogs), is in the third year of her Bachelor of Zoology degree program. “We helped in collecting the dogs, giving them anti-parasite medicine, and preparing them for surgery,” she said. “I loved it; it was an amazing experience – culturally as well as vocationally. It was my first real encounter with an Indigenous community.”

Next month (on the 12^th and 13^th of October), AMRRIC will conduct a conference at UNE in partnership with UNE Animal Science. Titled “Outback dogs – challenges and solutions for Indigenous communities, animals and public health”, the conference will feature presentations by UNE staff members (including Dr Brown), UNE students, AMRRIC veterinarians, the RSPCA, and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.