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