2018 winners and finalists

[man speaks to camera]

My name is Tuan Van Nguyen. And I am a professor of predictive medicine at the School of Biomedical Engineering of UTS. 

My work is really concerned with the prevention of bone fractures due to osteoporosis or low bone mass. So, osteoporosis and osteoporotic fractures, they both represent a major and substantial public health problem – not just in Australia, but also worldwide.

We approached the problem through epidemiological research, genetic research and clinical research, and clinical translation. 

We came up with the world’s first algorithm for predicting fracture risk at the individual level. We found that each standard deviation lower in BMD [bone marrow density] actually increased the risk of fracture by two fold. And that particular finding was used as a criteria for the diagnosis of osteoporosis around the world. 

So that’s one of our major contributions. But the thing that’s really rewarding is that after the publication of the model, there were hundreds of studies around the world that tried to validate the model, or were inspired by the idea that patient and doctor alike can use. That’s the most rewarding experience for us.
 

[Music. Woman talks to camera.]

I'm Cynthia Whitchurch I'm a professor here at UTS. My area of research is microbiology. So I'm intrigued by understanding bacteria and how they behave, how do they coordinate their activities.

What's kept me fascinated is trying to understand how what we think of just as really simple single-celled organisms, how do they actually behave in these really complex ways.

When I joined UTS, I established the Microbial Imaging Facility. We can visualise subcellular structures of bacteria using these super resolution microscopy techniques, and it's just an amazing time to be a microbiologist, actually.

The major contributions that I've had scientifically is demonstrating that bacteria release extracellular DNA and when DNA is outside of the cell, it can have functions that have got nothing to do with genetic coding.

And so when it’s outside of the cell, it actually functions as a glue, and it is used as a glue to hold these bacterial communities together. So I demonstrated it had a function and now from there it's been shown to be a ubiquitous process – lots of other microorganisms use DNA as a glue.

And what's really cool about that is that there's an enzyme that cystic fibrosis patients use to help clear that their mucus load, called pulmosyme, but it's actually an enzyme that breaks up DNA. So it's now used in some countries prophylactically in an attempt to reduce the rate of infection of CF patients.

Where I'm really excited about where we're heading now is in this drug discovery project that we've got going where we're exploring the bacterial lifestyle transition, when they get exposed to penicillin antibiotics we find that they're susceptible to other things. And I think that there's a lot of prospect in there to actually go in and maybe come up with new ways of dealing with antimicrobial resistance. I think we need some smart approaches to help combat that, and maybe we can contribute to that.

Those breakthroughs are worth it every time.

[Music]

[Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt talks to camera]

Hi I'm Larissa Behrendt, I'm a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Indigenous Research and I'm Director of Research and Academic programs at the Jumbunna Institute.

The heart of my research looks at really social justice issues around the Indigenous community, people who are the subject of policing and the criminal justice system but also as victims of crime. Along the way I started to think about how research really integrated with the community conversations we were having.

The Bowraville community, I think they were the ones who, who, focused on the importance of telling their story through film so we worked with them to do a documentary and off the back of that we wrote the application that was submitted by the police to the Attorney General to have the case re-heard. When you hear a parent talk about what it's like to lose a child and how much they need justice to have closure and what they see justice as being which is having their day in court that is the most powerful argument you can make to any lawmaker, to any policymaker.

I think for myself and most of my team at Jumbunna we would say quite proudly that we're advocates, that we have a point of view, that we argue for change, we, we, we advocate for it and we protest for it. I mean we love a good protest we'll get in the streets and we'll protest.

We do a range of things that means that we're not just academics. I feel really proud that we are a social justice university and I feel really proud that we've got moments in our recent history that we can point to, where we can say we were the university that stood up when nobody else had the guts to do it.

[Associate Professor Thalia Anthony talks to camera]

My research predominantly concerns Indigenous peoples' interactions with the criminal justice system. Australia has the most incarcerated people in the world when it comes to Indigenous Australians, more so even than African-Americans that is known worldwide as a huge issue. 

So one of the key areas that I'm looking at is Indigenous women and their incarceration and often unfortunately they face many other adverse interactions with institutions right from the point of child welfare and into juvenile justice and then into adult prisons and I think that there are a number of strategies that can be developed along that path to diversion that involve empowering Indigenous women and so the research tries to identify some of these strategies and shed light on these life stories that are often silenced and I think that these holistic approaches will make us shift to resources hopefully, away from money in prisons and police and towards money in communities and that might be programs for Indigenous people, better education, better housing.

If they see those small changes that gives them hope that their voice is being listened to and that, you know, the broader society is not oblivious but actually is responsive to their needs. So I think if we engage communities from the outset of research and not just at the dissemination point the research is going to be much more relevant to them and in turn it can have much greater impact. 

My name is Thalia Anthony and I'm an Associate Professor in Law at UTS.  

[Associate Professor Danielle Logue talks to camera]
I work in the area of social innovation which is looking at new solutions to social problems. I was interested in this because I was a little bit tired actually of all this talk about how much money was out there to do good and why wasn't anything happening.

The term impact investing was coined about 10 years ago and the activity's really gathered steam since the global financial crisis and it's this idea that as an investor you don't have to trade off financial returns for social and environmental returns. 

What's been great about this field of research is that you really need to work across the not-for-profit sector, community sector, but then also the public sector, the private sector, your investors, your banks, your superannuation funds and it's not often that you get the chance to bring together social workers and bankers at the same table. They've got different value systems, measurement systems, different languages. So if you take a sociological point of view you can begin to unpack those particular problems and solve them. 

We worked with a new unit in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade called the innovation exchange and we did a lot of the early research and scoping that informed a range of new programs that they've recently launched in the past six to twelve months on frontier innovations and scaling social innovations in particular so supporting social entrepreneurs across the Pacific to supporting the incubators that help them to get investor ready into scale and then to also bring different investors to the table as well. 

I'm also looking at new developments in recidivism and a project with colleagues in Argentina with a prisoner rugby team that's having great impact on reducing recidivism rates and whether that can transfer into the Australian context and also projects that are looking at scaling and rapid growth firms, firms that have a social mission and whether you can hang on to that social mission as you grow so there's lots of work to do. 

I'm Danielle Logue and I'm an Associate Professor at UTS Business School.

[Music plays. Associate Professor Kate Barclay speaks to camera]

I’m a marine social scientist, so I work on the social aspects of fisheries and agriculture and marine conservation.

When I first started 20 years ago, especially in Australia, people asked me, ‘What do you mean, marine social science? Don't you mean marine biology?’ They didn't see a reason why someone would focus on people who live near and work in the sea.

Now calls for expressions of interest for research projects and things, nearly half the projects have got some kind of social angle to them, because industry and government know they need to understand people better and why people are behaving the way they do.

Sustainability is really important and fisheries and aquaculture can contribute to environmental sustainability through having stakeholders who are interested in the quality of the environment. So a really easy to understand example is oysters. Oyster producers need really high water quality to be able to produce oysters that they can sell. So there you have a stakeholder in an area that's going to be really pushing for high water quality. And in some places that we've looked at, we can see where oyster farmers have been some of the people pushing hardest for local councils and other people to keep the water quality high.

And we're also using a similar approach to look at tuna fisheries in the Solomon Islands and Indonesia. We're engaged particularly in Indonesia where the government has been pushing to understand more of the social and economic aspects of their fisheries, and pushing to improve their fisheries management. So there's a real potential that this could be taken up in Indonesia as part of policy at different levels – local level provincial level and the national level.

I'm Kate Barclay. I'm an associate professor here in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney.

[Professor Dikai Liu talks to camera]

My main research focus is field infrastructure robotics. Basically developing and enabling methodologies which can really help robots to do things intelligently. 
The Centre for Autonomous Systems has been involved in many research projects and with many, many industry partners. And the projects I have been working with basically is more for the civil infrastructure like bridges, and one is the autonomous robot for maintaining the Sydney Harbour Bridge. 

The other robots I’ve develop, including the bio-inspired climbing robot, for inspecting the confined spaces like the arches. We are claiming these projects are the first of their kind because there's no such robots available for this kind of applications. 

Basically we get the idea from biological systems like the inchworm or the caterpillar. The main focus of this research is really try to improve the working conditions of people. This kind of robot can be adapted for different applications like the  energy industry or oil gas industry and other industries. In 10 years, I can see more and more intelligent robots will be developed and will be ready to work together with people. I can see the real applications and how much these kind of research outcomes can help people. 

I'm Dikai Liu, Professor in UTS Centre for Autonomous Systems, Infrastructure Robotics.

[Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt talks to camera]

Hi I'm Larissa Behrendt, I'm a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Indigenous Research and I'm Director of Research and Academic programs at the Jumbunna Institute.

The heart of my research looks at really social justice issues around the Indigenous community, people who are the subject of policing and the criminal justice system but also as victims of crime. Along the way I started to think about how research really integrated with the community conversations we were having.

The Bowraville community, I think they were the ones who, who, focused on the importance of telling their story through film so we worked with them to do a documentary and off the back of that we wrote the application that was submitted by the police to the Attorney General to have the case re-heard. When you hear a parent talk about what it's like to lose a child and how much they need justice to have closure and what they see justice as being which is having their day in court that is the most powerful argument you can make to any lawmaker, to any policymaker.

I think for myself and most of my team at Jumbunna we would say quite proudly that we're advocates, that we have a point of view, that we argue for change, we, we, we advocate for it and we protest for it. I mean we love a good protest we'll get in the streets and we'll protest.

We do a range of things that means that we're not just academics. I feel really proud that we are a social justice university and I feel really proud that we've got moments in our recent history that we can point to, where we can say we were the university that stood up when nobody else had the guts to do it.

[Associate Professor Sarath Kodgoda talks to camera]

Well, mechatronics is what you can call the robotics as well. The students basically learn about how to program microcontrollers, how to work with actuators, how to work with the sensors, how to do control, how to do programming.

So, we created an environment for them to work on their projects while we are mentoring. At the same time, I wanted to add a bit more excitement to it by introducing a competition to assess the performance. So that’s called competition-based assessment.

The particular subject that I was talking about is called Mechatronics 2. What you are basically doing is trying to create opportunities for the students to learn robotics or mechatronics in a fun-filled way. You decide the way that you want to – how you want to – go there. But in order to go there, these are the skill sets needed.

We provide some information about it and we teach them how to get that information we mentor them. So in that way they will have more time to think, time to innovate. It is going beyond the boundaries of this class.

 So the students are now self-motivated to do their own project. Also they have now created their own robotics society, where they basically manage their own projects. They are facilitating workshops for all other students who are maybe first years or have very limited knowledge of robots.

I see that they are growing as lifelong learners. I believe that is what I am really proud of.

I am Sarath Kodgoda. I am Associate Professor, Deputy Director of core Centre for Autonomous Systems, teaching and learning side.