The results that we’re getting are quite controversial in a way.
You can’t talk about the research in detail can you?
Not at this stage, no.
How’d you go at school today?
Good
I feel like a rockstar! Hi! [Greeting chatter]
[the] last bit of kit that I bought before, or that arrived before I left, didn’t fit through the door so they had to expand it. It was a little bit embarrassing.
PowerPoint is always difficult. Yeah. [laughs]
I focus on how the government or the international community deals with disease outbreaks and international pandemics.
Prior to the Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organisation had really walked away from talking about disease outbreaks in terms of health security… and then Ebola happened.
And on the other side of Ebola, everyone is talking about global health security again.
This morning we’ve got a big meeting with a professional conference organiser for this big event in 2019.
The conference itself, the theme of it is looking at global health security, so it’s all to do with managing adverse health events as they potentially spread around the world.
And it’s the first conference of its kind to ever be held,
which is going to hopefully then outline some key principles and guidelines for organisations working in the field of global public health.
The idea behind this event is to bring all the stakeholders together, bring them here to Sydney and get them to commit to help low-income countries.
We’re part of the discovery of binary neutron star merger by LIGO.
So LIGO detected these two neutron stars merging and forming a black hole,
which is the first time they detected gravitational waves from something like that.
Our team at Sydney Uni were part of the follow up team.
So we were observing with a radio telescope trying to look for electromagnetic radiation from the neutron stars.
I’m presenting at Sydney Science Forum, apparently we’ve got like 600 people coming,
talking about gravitational wave discovery and our role in the radio follow up.
Since the detection in August, the first wave,
there was a bit of a reprieve, then in radio we’re still monitoring this source.
We’ve been monitoring it for 200 days.
We actually just submitted our last paper yesterday.
Submitting that paper and doing this talk… after that we’re having a bit of a breather.
Having done a decade of lecturing,
I’ve got much better at it.
It’s still quite daunting when you have so many people turning up, yes.
[lecturing] I’ll start with August 17th, 2017, when we heard this chirp of a new era for the first time and I’ll play this famous chirp,
some of you may have already heard it in the news.
And you know we do this for everyone,
and so getting out and talking to people about what we do and having them excited about it.
That’s a real highlight.
It’s nice to come along tonight with some students from my old school and have them say “she’s… that was so inspiring”.
I guess I love having Tara in my class because she had this desire to learn.
So it’s such a delight to come along to see a rising star in Australian astronomy.
My research is on Australian politics and democracy and I look at political parties and try to understand why political parties aren’t really operating in the way that we want them to.
So today is like basically the biggest week in my life,
uh, from an academic perspective.
It’s the confluence of three massive events:
a- the budget was released on Tuesday, so I’ve been doing commentary around that,
didn’t go to the lock-up but thank god for that,
a section 44 case was handed down yesterday in the High Court so that’s a big debate
around Parliamentary representation and citizenship, and all of this week is the Eurovision song contest,
which for some signals dread, and for others like me, is one of the biggest political events of the year.
So today I am giving a lecture to our first year Politics and International Relations students,
there should be one hundred or so first-years in the room.
Some of them are going to know what Eurovision is,
others are going to have absolutely no idea whatsoever so it’s my job to teach them how to look at Eurovision through a political lens.
[lecturing] So, ABBA. If you don’t know who ABBA is, I can’t really help you.
[Audience laughs]
I’m heading over to Geneva,
and the main purpose of this is to do some research and collaboration with the World Health Organisation
particularly looking at how we can identify the types of behaviours that governments are doing when they breach the international
health regulations and build a database around that.
Once we’ve got that database we might then be able to develop more informed strategies as to how we can actually stop countries putting in trade bans and travel restrictions.
I’m going to be in Geneva for about four months [laughs]
I’ve gotta say, living out of a suitcase is not a part that I love,
but all that aside, yes this is the stuff that I love doing.
It’s getting in and doing the research.
Um, I’ve got a two-day meeting coming up with representatives from multiple countries around the world to talk about the International Health Regulations.
One of the issues and topics that we will be talking about is the fact that we want to start to increase compliance monitoring.
I’m going to be spending the next couple of hours trying to finish some writing. Um, this is the luxurious life of an academic.
The research I’m focusing on in this project is about materials for energy storage and conversion,
so specifically ionic conducting materials for battery and fuel cell applications.
I’m working very much on the actual atomic scale structure and dynamics of materials.
Miniaturising everything down that small and getting it to work and getting it all in place is,
is uh, a multi-year project.
So at the end of last year I got a prize from the Humboldt Society that gives me fifty-five thousand euros,
so I officially started sabbatical on I think it was January 12.
[Off camera] has the SOAR got anything to do with most of this?
-Yes, you know, some of the two out of four things I am working on,
and the first and the highest-priority ones are directly related to the energy materials and even the specifically battery stuff that the SOAR is tied to.
In theory you could take six months every three and a half years,
but in practice I don’t think anyone comes even remotely close to that.
It takes quite a bit of organising.
So, this year I started out across to China, gave a talk there, met people, it was really good.
came back for 24 hours, I think
and then flew off to the States
I was in Provo in Utah
A collaborator I wanted to work with on the theoretical side of crystallography
and we got back on the Thursday/Friday, drove for 18 hours on the weekend and went down to Victoria and just popped back last night.
Tomorrow I'll spend the day out at ANSTO
See briefly out there our experiments that happened at the neutron facility
Try and get everything as organised as I can with my research students on Friday and then I disappear again.
On Tuesday and Thursday
I pick my son up at three
my son just started school this year, so kindergarten, still getting used to it but going well so far.
This year I deliberately decided to keep life slightly more in balance
Particularly with both of us travelling it's pretty intense.
Having a five year old and both doing a lot of travel for work obviously like it's a huge coordination problem.
And most of the time we're really good at organising our calendars,
but just occasionally, you know, things go wrong, um last year there was a good one where I miscalculated
and ended up in Italy a day earlier than my partner got back from Perth
so we had to do a bit of an emergency ring in of my mum
Hello, how are you?
probably one of the biggest changes that's happened was that I kinda originally envisaged going over to the WHO for a period of about four months.
Being able to get access to some data and then running away and being able to write up some papers.
What I've discovered since arriving there has been that, um, how I thought they were already capturing data
it turns out they, haven't been.
So, since I've arrived we actually have done the very first time ever this live data capture of travel and trade sanctions that countries have been putting in place with regards to disease outbreaks
And what I'm actually doing now is helping build the data capture system with the WHO.
So, what do you miss when you go overseas?
This is going to make me sound like a coffee snob, but decent Australian coffee.
The aim of my research is to find better
dietary treatments
for obesity.
I was someone who did struggle with obesity and i knew that the strategies that were available were really second rate.
Health professionals dont tend to use fast weight loss because of the perception that it's unsafe so people in this diet trial, they lose weight either fast or slow, and then we measure outcome measurements related to health and safety.
I've just spent a day here in this beautiful
Swiss chalet kind of building, but it's behind the Chalet facade is the World Health Organisation collaborating centre
for the management of chronic diseases
Today was just a fabulous day
of learning, and on the other side there was also lots of things that i was able to bring to the team here in Geneva.
We've got a few new results coming out
And some of the team members of my team, they've been selected to present the work
in oral presentations at international conferences.
One of our team members is going to do a run through of their talk
because the results that we are getting are quite controversial in a way and they are shaking up a little bit of the dogma
around weight management and how we do it
Publishing the data is like a dream when you finally publish it
Because this study is more than 10 years of getting participants into the study
and ethics approval and protocols
Everything it was like endless steps
So when it gets published it's like
oh my gosh, that is so good.
But often by then I'm too tired to celebrate, but I'm celebrating, you know, quietly, in my heart.