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Algae Business Summit
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00:04
[Music playing]
00:05
Peter: Algae are amazing microscopic organisms.
00:07
They’re a tenth the size of a human hair, there’s 300,000 species on the planet, and
00:14
they can make virtually any product we need.
00:18
Algae has the potential for industrial applications covering three areas, so that’s agricultural
00:24
biotech, industrial biotech and medical biotech.
00:27
These three industries together are worth about $350 billion in the US.
00:32
The Australian opportunity here is massive and this is what we here at UTS are moving
00:38
into.
00:39
Samantha: Studying biotechnology at UTS is very different from what I expected.
00:45
Coming into the subject, I had no idea there were so many diverse applications of algae.
00:51
We study things like bioinformatics, and intricate circuits that had to do with biosensors.
00:57
They were challenging, but to be honest, I thought that they were impossible before I
01:03
did this subject, because a lot of my fellow students and I felt like we weren’t capable
01:10
of doing those things, that we weren’t capable of writing codes or working with circuits,
01:15
and that was a really eye-opening thing.
01:17
The lecturers and subject coordinators at UTS, they’re really engaging in biotechnology
01:23
now, and they’re teaching us about it now, so I think having that insight into technology
01:31
that’s only just emerging is really equipping me for the future.
01:34
Peter: The jobs that are emerging in the algal biotech space will involve engineers to optimise
01:40
the production of that.
01:42
Designers, molecular engineers to modify the algae.
01:46
Strain optimisation specialists.
01:48
So, all of these biological but also engineering-type opportunities are where they industry’s
01:55
going to need trained technicians and also experimental scientists to take their industry
02:01
forward.
02:02
Instead of just training the students and hoping they get a job at the end, we work
02:06
with them throughout their postgraduate degree program where we meet with industry partners
02:11
on a monthly basis, and our students are industry facing, so they’re ready at the end of their
02:16
PhDs to work straight into an industry position.
02:20
These jobs are the jobs of the future, and UTS is able to train these students in this space.
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