The University of Sydney has been successful in securing five prestigious Federation Fellowships, more than any other Australian university.
The fellowships, which were announced by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon Julie Bishop MP on May 21st, provide researchers of international standing an opportunity to focus on their groundbreaking work, ensuring that Australia continues to attract and retain the best researchers.
Sydney University researchers Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte (manufacturing engineering), Professor Ben Eggleton (optical physics) and Professor Huw Price (philosophy) have been offered a second Federation Fellowship.
Two new Federation Fellowships have been awarded to Dr Joss Bland-Hawthorn, who is currently based at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and who specialises in the physical sciences, and Dr Peter Waterhouse, who isa specialist in genetics currently based at the CSIRO Plant Industry.
The University currently has a total of 15 Federation Fellows working in fields as diverse as condensed matter theoryandrobotics.
Dr Joss Bland-Hawthorn - Astrophotonics: Exploiting a new technological frontier to probe back to the Dark Ages
Dr Joss Bland-Hawthorn is a world-renowned leader in astrophysical research. He is one of a few scientists currently exploring the interface between instrumentation and astronomy, bringing together developments from the fields of astronomy, optics, photonics and engineering.
Dr Bland-Hawthorn will exploit recent advances in the new field of astrophotonics to provide images of the universe free from interference at critical light wavelengths, such as the infra-red region. Until now, our understanding of galaxies like the Milky Way has been limited by interference from the Earth's atmosphere which swamps the infra-red signal from objects in space. By filtering out the interference, we will be able to see and interpret the galactic 'building blocks' for the first time. The proposed new cutting-edge devices will test technology essential to the next generation of infrared telescopes, and will enable new innovations in other fields of applied science.
Dr Bland-Hawthorn completed his PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Sussex and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In 1988 he moved to the US, where he held a tenured professorship at Rice University. He returned to Australia in 1993 and joined the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Since 2001, he has been Head of Instrument Science at the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
Dr Bland-Hawthorn has been awarded fellowships from national and international institutions, including the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1988); the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore USA (1993); the Naval Research Laboratory, USA (1994); Merton College, Oxford (1996); the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge (1997); the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA (1999-2002); and Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Marseille (2005-2008).
Dr Peter Waterhouse - Small RNAs: What makes a plant, a plant
Dr Peter Waterhouse is Chief Research Scientist and leader of the Gene Silencing Laboratory at CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra. He is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking research on plant viruses, and he led the way in uncovering the mechanism, roles and applications of post-transcriptional gene silencing in plants, also termed RNA interference (RNAi).
Small RNAs (sRNA) play a number of key roles in the development of plants and animals, such as providing protection against viruses, regulating and protecting chromosomes, perceiving the environment, and regulating developmental transitions.
Dr Waterhouse will study currently obscure sRNA pathways that play fundamental roles critical to the development and health of plants. Many of the pathways have essential counterparts in animals and may have implications for medical research.
His research program will aim to deliver technologies for silencing signals to plants to improve agronomic traits; inserting synthetic microRNAs into plants to alter plant architecture; and altering DNA structure to affect long-term agronomic traits.
Dr Waterhouse completed his PhD in plant virology at the University of Dundee and the Scottish Crop Research Institute. He has received several awards, including the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium Thomson ISI Award as the CSIRO researcher with the most highly cited papers between 1998 and 2003, the Victor Chang Medal (2002) and the CSIRO Chairman's Medal for his work in the gene silencing/RNAi field (2005).
In 2003, Dr Waterhouse was named in The Bulletin's 'Top Ten Smartest Scientists in Australia'. He was the CSIRO Representative on the Prime Minister's Science and Engineering Council - Gene Technology Working Group. He has numerous patents covering the applications of his discoveries.
Dr Waterhouse is a member of the editorial board/advisory committee of the journals Molecular Plant Pathology; Functional Plant Biology; and Plant Methods. -University of Sydney
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