UWS Research Supplement 2012

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UWS RESeARCH Inside: Corals: Glowing in the Dark Putting the Pressure on Preeclampsia Tackling our Health Challenges EucFACE at Hawkesbury

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UWS

Building on research strengths

Photo: Professor Andrew Cheetham

Front page cover: Scolymia tentacles, Lord Howe Island coral.

Full story page 13.

The University of Western Sydney has taken a strategic approach to the development of its research capabilities in recent years, and it is paying dividends in terms of research output and performance, as well as in attracting a new generation of research stars.

Professor Andrew Cheetham, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research), says, “As a relatively young and growing university, we are able to be more dynamic in selectively concentrating on our research strengths.”

The University’s strategic approach to research concentration has resulted in the development of a number of highly regarded research institutes: • Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) • Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE) • The MARCS Institute • Institute for Infrastructure Engineering (IIE) “We have been recruiting high quality professorial staff, as well as talented, enthusiastic early career and postdoctoral researchers, into these four Institutes and in our developing research areas” says Professor Cheetham.

In January 2011 the outcomes of the inaugural Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)

Initiative illustrated that in its key areas of research specialisation, UWS received the highest ranking for research quality in the national quality assessment. The University received a ranking of 5 in Cultural Studies, related to the work of the ICS, and in Plant Biology related to the work of the HIE, indicating performance “well above world standard”. In addition, UWS earned a ranking of 4 for Civil Engineering, “above world standard”, for research aligned with the IIE. Rankings of 4 were also received for Performing Arts and Creative Writing, and Literary Studies, related to the work of the Writing and Society Research Centre.

“Of the 21 broad research disciplines in which UWS is research active, the majority of our ratings indicated UWS research was performing at or above world standard. This was a pleasing result that demonstrates the strength of the UWS research concentrations, and we believe that in this year’s ERA, we will see further improvements,’’ says Professor Cheetham.

To add to the high performing Research Institutes, UWS is also building a strategic focus in health research.

“In the future, Greater Western Sydney will have significant health issues, and we want to be able to make a major contribution to managing these, so we are growing our research capabilities in this area,” says Professor Cheetham.

The University’s focus on investing in areas of research strength is exemplified by the intensive recruitment program that has seen over 200 new academic staff join UWS in the last two years – a program which will continue into the years ahead.

Professor Cheetham says that having strong professorial staff in its research institutes naturally acts as a “magnet” for ambitious young researchers. The University also offers a range of positions to early career researchers that encourage and help them build and establish their research profile.

“We are attracting the most remarkably capable early career researchers from all over the world, including the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Germany. We are recruiting the best and brightest there is. It is a very exciting time for the University in many areas, and particularly so in research.”

For more information on UWS Research visit www.uws.edu.au/research

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Putting the pressure on preeclampsia

Photo: Professor Annemarie Hennessy

Preeclampsia is the most common complication of pregnancy affecting one in 10 pregnant women, with over one million women affected worldwide every year. Preeclampsia is the leading cause of premature birth and can result in both infant and maternal mortality, causing the deaths of approximately 780 babies every day in the world.

Professor Annemarie Hennessy, Dean of the UWS School of Medicine, is leading the crossdisciplinary Preeclampsia Research Team, which is investigating the links between high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease in women especially around the time of pregnancy.

The team brings together scientists, doctors, midwifes, pharmacologists, and even veterinarians to gain new insights into a range of research areas – from how the placenta functions to outcomes for women who have had high blood pressure or preeclampsia in their pregnancy.

Preeclampsia is essentially a placental disease, and in 2011 the UWS team published a breakthrough finding on the way a placenta reacts in a toxic environment.

“What our lab has been able to demonstrate is that the toxic compounds that affect the way the placenta grows and develops are now easily identified, and that has been due to a real breakthrough in preeclampsia work in the last few years,” says Professor Hennessy.

Preeclampsia is not only dangerous for mothers and babies during pregnancy – the associated high blood pressure can also cause vascular damage, leading to health problems later in life.

By examining the health of women who have been involved in large epidemiological studies conducted over the last 20 years, Professor Hennessy and her team are seeking to find out whether women who have suffered from high blood pressure and preeclampsia during pregnancy

are more likely to have more aggressive blood pressure issues later in life, and the effect different treatments have on their long-term health outcomes.

It is hoped this information will help to identify women at higher risk of heart attack or stroke.

The UWS team is also collaborating with Canadian researchers to study the effects of different levels of blood pressure control for women who are currently pregnant and have preeclampsia.

While being able to identify which pregnancies are high-risk for preeclampsia is a helpful first step, being able to recommend treatment options or management strategies is the ultimate goal.

“If we know the mechanisms of the disease, which is what we’re finding out by identifying the toxins, then hopefully it will give us a much better chance of finding a treatment,” says Professor Hennessy.

“The natural progression is that if you can get the pregnancy to be as healthy as it can be, then it would diminish the impact of that pregnancy on any longterm health outcomes, in terms of increasing the risk of stroke or heart attack.”

For more information on research at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research

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The way we communicate

Photos L-R: P rofessor Kate Stevens and Professor Denis Burnham, Steve Fazio and Lei Jing programming software for the AusTalk black box at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Mother and baby at MARCS Baby Lab

Experimental psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and neuroscientists collaborate at the MARCS Institute to answer some of the most crucial questions about brain, behaviour and computation, and to provide a better understanding of human communication.

MARCS Institute, led by Professor Denis Burnham, has five key research programs – Speech and Language; Music Cognition and Action; Bioelectronics and Sensory Neuroscience; Multisensory Processing; and Human-Machine Interaction.

MARCS researchers use high-tech facilities including Electroencephalography (EEG), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), motion capture, Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), a performance studio, a human-machine interaction lab with virtual reality, conversational agents and robots, and the specialised Baby Lab. Among the projects underway at MARCS is the ‘Seeds of Literacy’ longitudinal study, investigating precursors to dyslexia that might be seen in very early speech perception and language acquisition.

In the Music Cognition and Action program, researchers are investigating how elements of music assist in the memory of a dance routine.

“We’re very interested in what music and dance tell us about things such as learning and human memory,” says Professor Kate Stevens.

Researchers in the Multisensory Processing program are investigating how the speech perception of people with one sensory modality loss – such as hearing impairment – might be augmented through another modality such as vision, while in the Human-Machine Interaction area, the Thinking Head project provides a research platform for different experiments designed to create more realistic avatars.

These avatars can be used in information kiosks, as companions for the elderly, and as virtual language tutors. Finally, the Bioelectronics and Sensory Neuroscience program aims to reverse engineer the brain, and is setting about doing so using the combined skills of electrical engineers, and computational and sensory neuroscientists.

For more information on the MARCS Institute visit: http://marcs.uws.edu.au

Recording Australian English

Understanding baby talk

Never before has there been a large-scale collection of audio and visual speech data in Australia – but that is about to change, as the AusTalk project nears completion.

A collaborative project between 11 universities, AusTalk is headed by researchers from MARCS and involves 30 of the top speech science and technology experts from around Australia.

Three hours of speech by each of 1000 Australian English speakers in various contexts from all around the country are being collected in a database which will represent the regional and social diversity and linguistic variations of Australian English, including Australian Aboriginal English.

AusTalk will act as a catalogue for Australian researchers and developers to improve our interaction with devices such as telephone-based speech recognition systems, hearing aids and computer technologies for learning-impaired children.

Research underway in the MARCS Baby Lab demonstrates the importance of infant-directed speech or ‘baby talk’.

Professor Kate Stevens says that far from being detrimental to children’s language acquisition, infant-directed speech is highly functional and used by caregivers in almost all cultures.

“It has very distinct features – it has a higher pitch, positive emotion, and hyperarticulation of vowels. It attracts and maintains the attention of infants, it allows the infant to start to model turntaking and social interaction, and it scaffolds language learning.

So there’s almost a teaching process that we all do without even realising we’re doing it,” says Professor Stevens.

Other projects build on this research to examine, for example, how caregivers speak to infants with hearing impairment.

“There are some subtle differences that caregivers might not be aware of, but which perhaps provide an impoverished input to an infant with hearing impairment who already has an impoverished signal. There are really important things we can learn from looking at clinical populations and comparing them with the way parents talk to their hearing siblings.”

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Research tall poppies flourish at UWS

Photo: Associate Professor Hilary Bambrick

Associate Professor Hilary Bambrick is an environmental epidemiologist from the UWS School of Medicine, and was named the 2011 Young Tall Poppy.

The annual Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, run by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS), aim to recognise the contributions of young Australian researchers and communicators.

“What’s valuable about this award is the public recognition of the value of knowledge gained through scientific endeavour,” Associate Professor Bambrick says.

“For me personally, it’s broader recognition of my small contribution to an important field of research that is becoming increasingly relevant.

While the health impacts of climate change have only really come to the attention of mainstream media in the last five years, this research area has been developing for more than two decades.”

Associate Professor Bambrick is the University’s fourth Young Tall Poppy, joining previous winners: Professor Ian Anderson from the UWS Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment; and Dr Leigh Sheppard and Dr Maria Nowotny, both from the UWS School of Science and Health.

She is currently working on two major projects. The first is on understanding climate change impacts and adaptation in major cities, especially as these relate to heat waves, as part of the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship

Collaboration on Human Health.

The second is on investigating the health impacts specific to Indigenous communities, which has received National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding.

Associate Professor Bambrick explains the advantage of science dispelling myths about climate change.

“In Australia, misperceptions about scientific uncertainty have been exploited by certain groups to misrepresent the science of climate change, giving a false impression that there is a debate about its existence or whether it is caused by human activity,” Associate Professor Bambrick says. “Under these circumstances it is especially important to be able to describe how science works to test hypotheses, and to present research clearly, and describe what it means in reality.”

Professor Ian Anderson, now Director of Research at the UWS Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, says winning a Tall Poppy Award undoubtedly helped springboard him into his current role.

“Winning a Tall Poppy Award has opened numerous doors for me and has resulted in rapid career advancement since winning the award,” he says.

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Tackling our tough health challenges UWS is a partner in a pioneering research centre that will help to interpret health research evidence to assist agencies in developing policy on some of our greatest health challenges, such as Indigenous health and obesity prevention.

The Centre for Informing Policy in Health with Evidence from Research (CIPHER) was established with $2.5 million of funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), as one of 11 Centres of Research Excellence around Australia. Professors Louisa Jorm and Sally Redman, from the UWS School of Medicine and the Sax Institute, are CIPHER’s lead investigators.

“CIPHER is all about developing and testing ways to increase the use of research in policy,” Professor Jorm says. “This is really the first large-scale trial of methods to increase the use of research evidence in policy, so it will actually provide information that currently isn’t available about what the best strategies are for doing this. It has a great deal of potential to improve the planning and delivery of health services.”

The first stage of CIPHER’s life has seen the recruitment of staff, the development of new

For more information on research at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research Photo: Professor Louisa Jorm

measurement methods and the design of a web portal. A trial of strategies for increasing the use of research in policy, Supporting Policy In Health with Research: an Intervention Trial (SPIRIT) is now underway.

“Because we’re involving quite a number of agencies in the trial, it won’t just develop methods, it will also hopefully have both short- and long-term impacts in terms of better health policy through those agencies,” Professor Jorm says.

One of the great strengths of CIPHER is the collaborations it enjoys with institutions across Australia and around the world, enabling its researchers to draw on diverse knowledge and expertise, and utilise their geographical reach.

“Having an interstate partner in Melbourne gives us opportunities to pilot some of our methods in Victorian policy agencies to make sure that they work across the country,” Professor Jorm says. “Similarly having a Scottish connection means that the methods we develop will potentially be applicable in the international context as well.”

For more information on research at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research

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Using new materials for greater strength

Photo: Associate Professor Zhong Tao and PhD student Kamrul Hassan

Associate Professor Zhong Tao from the UWS Institute for Infrastructure Engineering has been awarded several Australian Research Council grants, including a Future Fellowship, to investigate how steel-concrete composite structures can be made more cost-effective, faster to construct and with higher structural performance compared with traditional reinforced concrete and steel structures.

Associate Professor Tao is researching whether the conventional carbon steel can be replaced with stainless steel, which offers corrosion resistance and ease of maintenance.

“In structures, stainless steel offers benefits in terms of strength and stability under loading from wind or seismic actions,” says Associate Professor Tao. “The major benefit of this research is that the maintenance capacity of key infrastructure could be increased.”

Though stainless steel is relatively expensive, costing around three to four times the price of carbon steel, stainless steel tubular columns can be combined with concrete to lower construction costs while still getting the benefits of this material.

Because these columns will behave differently to standard

composite columns, the study will assess the behaviour of the columns under a variety of conditions and loads, with the results used to develop a new composite construction material.

Associate Professor Tao says his research is greatly assisted by having access to “one of the best equipped laboratories in the country” at UWS. A new 1000-tonne test rig, the largest in Australia, is being installed at the Institute’s facilities on the Penrith campus to be used in the studies.

Also underway at the Institute is a project investigating environmentally friendly alternatives to Portland cement, which is currently used in concrete-filled steel and stainless columns and generates large amounts of greenhouse gases during manufacture.

Researchers are testing lowemission alternatives, such as fly ash, slag and geo-polymers, to find the optimum concrete mix to reduce Portland cement content while maintaining the strength of the columns.

For more information on the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering visit www.uws.edu.au/iie

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Writing without boundaries Reusable buildings a step closer Photo: Professor Brian Uy

Imagine being able to assemble and disassemble major structures in the same way a child might put together a Meccano creation.

By investigating the way concrete is connected using steel, researchers at the UWS Institute for Infrastructure Engineering are moving a step closer to this in reality.

Professor Brian Uy, Foundation Director of the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering, and Dr Olivia Mirza, are undertaking a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project to develop connections which would allow the creation of truly demountable structures.

Professor Uy says current Australian Standards dictate that structures must have a 50-year design life.

“At the end of that time, if the building needs to be demolished, it’s usually a fairly intricate process.

Even a controlled implosion can be quite dangerous,” he says.

By using a ‘blind bolting’ technique, the elements in the structures – the steel beams, columns, and concrete slabs – could be unbolted, removed and potentially used again. This not only removes the need for demolition, but it could also see steel being reused rather than

recycled, which is energy-intensive and generates greenhouse gas emissions.

This technique could also be used to rehabilitate structures.

“For example, if you have a bridge that now has insufficient load-carrying capability, we could go out to a site, drill through the concrete slab, and bolt it to a steel beam, and you may be able to get another 25 years of life from that particular structure,” says Professor Uy. Another key research program within the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering is infrastructure health monitoring, and Professor Uy says that in the future, these monitoring techniques could also be incorporated into demountable structures. Part of the project’s preliminary phase saw the researchers collaborate with the Department of Main Roads in WA, to use sensors to assess the condition of a bridge for example, and potential damage to different parts.

“When you’ve identified where that damage is, you can use the blind bolting technique to repair it.”

For more information on the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering visit www.uws.edu.au/iie

With a series of literary events, the UWS Writing and Society Research Centre is working with other countries to “foster high-level cultural exchange”, says Director, Professor Anthony Uhlmann.

The China Australia Literary Forum hosted by the Centre in August 2011 brought together ten major Australian writers and ten major Chinese writers to discuss the translation and reception of their works.

The forum led to the translation of Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel Carpentaria, which was launched

by Australian Ambassador to China, Francis Adamson, as part of the 2012 Australian Writer’s Week in Beijing.

Professor Uhlmann says the success of the forum has prompted discussion about further collaboration with China, including a second forum next year with a dedicated session for literary criticism at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.

The Centre has also initiated the forthcoming India-Australia Literary Forum, which will be held at the State Library of NSW in September.

“Literature opens doors between cultures.”

Professor Uhlmann says the “high level of diplomatic interest” highlights the importance of such interaction.

“Literature opens doors in ways that aren’t otherwise possible between cultures, and allows you to think about and discuss difficult issues.”

The idea of linking critical thinking and creative work is a central tenet of the Writing and Society Research Centre, and the Sydney Consortium exemplifies this concept. It offers a new way of thinking about postgraduate work, by linking a Master of Arts in Cultural and Creative Practice with industry partners such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, the State Library of New South Wales, the Australian Museum and the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Students can work with some of Australia’s leading writers, editors and critics to develop creative works.

Several of the Centre’s staff have been honoured with awards this year, with poet and translator Dr Chris Andrews awarded the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for his collection Lime Green Chair, while Fiona Wright’s collection Knuckled has been shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award, to be announced in July.

For more information on the Writing and Society Centre visit www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society

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Exciting new FACE of Hawkesbury The final piece of the multi-million dollar climate change research facility at the UWS Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE) has been completed.

The Eucalypt Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (EucFACE) facility enables scientists to track and study the impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations under totally natural climatic conditions on terrestrial ecosystems, including plants, insects and soil microbes.

Similar previous experiments internationally have been conducted in plantations or planted woodlands, but this is the first free air experiment in the world on native woodland. It is also unique in terms of the height of the trees being studied.

Professor David Ellsworth, who is senior scientific advisor on the EucFACE experiment, says it expands the research already underway in the tree chambers of the Hawkesbury Forest Experiment a hundred-fold, to examine an extensive ecosystem at the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations expected in about 35 years.

“It allows us to get a look at a future we might want to avoid,” says Professor Ellsworth. “One thing we expect to learn is how native woodlands actually deal with carbon dioxide – will they take up the excess carbon dioxide that we emit or not? That’s a really critical question nationally and internationally.”

This research will improve our understanding about the potential of native trees to absorb and store CO2, and the amount of water required to maintain high growth rates. The results generated will provide data to enable accurate accounting of carbon storage in forests under climate change and rising CO2 – essential information for participation in a national emissions trading scheme.

At the HIE, the EucFACE facility joins the whole tree chambers and FACE facility, designed to simulate future CO2 levels and climate, rainout shelters that simulate seasonal drought, an Eddy flux tower that measures water and CO2 fluxes at the forest ecosystem level, and an insectary for investigating the interaction between plants and insects under environmental change, to form the world’s most comprehensive climate change research facility.

EucFACE will also form part of the terrestrial ecosystem research network (TERN) that includes a site in every state in the country that will be conducting long-term monitoring of plants and animals as a bellweather site to assess the impacts of climate change.

Professor Ellsworth says it’s a very exciting time for the HIE.

“Certainly many of us feel very lucky to have not only such innovative facilities, but also the scientific expertise to do these experiments. UWS is really open to collaborations both nationally and internationally, so people find an open door here.”

For more information on the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE) visit www.uws.edu.au/hie

Photo: EucFACE site at the Hawkesbury Institue for the Environment

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Professor signals new era for research

For Professor Peter Reich, Foundation Director of the UWS Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE), the official launch of HIE in April 2012 signalled the start of a new collaborative research culture for UWS. “HIE is a new institute with important, ambitious goals – to help progress Australian and global science by becoming one of the world’s most advanced research sites for studying how terrestrial ecosystems respond to environmental change,” he says.

Professor Reich has been a research scientist and professor for more than 25 years, focusing on impacts of global environmental change on forests, grasslands and agricultural systems, and will remain a professor at the University of Minnesota through a joint affiliation with the HIE. Bringing extensive experience in developing and running large, long-term collaborative experiments, Professor Reich was attracted to the role primarily by the work being undertaken at HIE to enhance understanding of terrestrial ecosystems and global geophysical and climate sciences.

“Such experiments are rare elsewhere on the planet, so for me, personally, becoming involved at HIE was an opportunity to engage in important world-class science,” says Professor Reich.

“I hope that my focus on both broad, holistic system-scale processes as well as on the underlying mechanistic details will help guide the evolution of a similarly broad yet rich approach to ecosystem science at HIE.” The planned research direction for HIE, Professor Reich explains, is grounded in three main aims: to improve understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems respond to climate change and other environmental drivers; to better understand the implications of those responses for Australian natural and agricultural ecosystems, and help develop effective strategies for managing such ecosystems; and to collaborate with others who will be able to utilise HIE’s findings for practical purposes.

The importance of climate change in this Australian context lies in protecting an already sensitive continent.

“As climate change will make droughts, fires and floods even more common in Australia, it will place an ever greater burden on people and nature to sustainably cope with such challenges, in an already often harsh landscape and climate.”

Photo: Professor Peter Reich

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A pioneering woman Author and Doctor of Creative Arts candidate Jesse Blackadder travelled to Antarctica last year, following in the footsteps of Ingrid Christensen, who in 1931 became one of the first women ever to lay eyes on the icy continent.

Chosen as the 2011/2012 Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow, Ms Blackadder made the trip on board icebreaker Aurora Australis, as research for the novel she is writing on Christensen’s voyages.

Ms Blackadder is undertaking her Doctorate at the UWS Writing and Society Research Centre.

The journeys of the earliest female visitors have been largely forgotten in Antarctic exploration history, tending to be overshadowed by the great ‘heroic era’ explorers: Mawson, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen.

Integrating history and fiction, Ms Blackadder’s novel Chasing the Light (due out in February 2013) aims to offer insights into the life of a woman on board a maledominated Antarctic whaling ship in the 1930s.

“There’s a long history of women being prevented from going to Antarctica, and their stories not being recorded or considered worthwhile,” Ms Blackadder says. “The mythology of the heroic Antarctic explorer is so powerful that it drowns out every other story. But these women’s stories are fascinating in their own right.”

While Ms Blackadder had previously travelled to Antarctica as a tourist, the Fellowship enabled her to be part of a working ship and station life, providing a different perspective. She was also able to visit the part of Antarctica that Christensen actually travelled to.

Simply landing on Antarctica was another highlight for Ms Blackadder, particularly as it is not always possible.

“We came so early in the season that a lot of the sea ice was still frozen. It’s this incredible duck egg blue colour and you can hear it cracking and moving underneath you. It’s a beautiful thing,” she says.

In addition to the Fellowship, Ms Blackadder was also recently awarded the 2012 Guy Morrison Prize for Literary Journalism for her piece, ‘The first woman and the last dog in Antarctica’ describing her research into Ingrid Christensen.

For more information on the Writing and Society Research Centre visit www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society

Photo: Jesse Blackadder in Antarctica

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Photo: Dr Jason Shaw

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Photo: Dr Emma Waterton

Early career researchers make their mark at UWS UWS researchers Dr Jason Shaw and Dr Emma Waterton are among the first recipients of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA). Launched in 2011, the prestigious program supports promising early career researchers in Australian universities, providing recipients with funding to kick-start their research careers.

Voice signatures Dr Jason Shaw Ever wonder why voice recognition software often struggles to capture speech accurately? It’s because individual talkers each have their own speech characteristics – like a voice ‘signature’.

Phonologist Dr Jason Shaw, from the UWS School of Humanities and Communication Arts and the MARCS Institute, is investigating some of the commonalities and differences in individual voices, to understand how humans recognise both words and talkers.

Using his DECRA funding, Dr Shaw is building a model of how, for a speaker of Australian English, the movement of the ‘speech articulators’ such as the tongue and lower lip are timed relative to one another. This will provide insight into how people are able to perceive differences between individual talkers.

“When you listen to people talking, you know the meaning of the words that they are saying,

but you can also sometimes recognise the identity of the talker,” Dr Shaw says.

This project recognises that the same physical dimensions carry information about both words and talker identity.

“A key insight of the project is that different phonological structures (which allow us to recognise words) can be distinguished in the speech signal because they structure variability in different ways.

Because phonological structure is contained in the pattern of variability, the absolute values of physical dimensions can carry information about talker identity.”

Dr Shaw says the model will enable him to simulate temporal patterns in words produced by different talkers and make predictions about which talker can be distinguished by human ears on the basis of temporal patterns, and which talkers can not.

This could have major implications for evaluating ‘earwitness’ testimony in court cases, for example, and for the future development of voice recognition software.

For more information on the MARCS Institute visit: http://marcs.uws.edu.au

Heritage on site Dr Emma Waterton When Dr Emma Waterton visited Auschwitz, she felt an intense sadness resonating from the site. It started her on a path of thinking about affect and the way we behave at heritage sites as tourists, which is one of the key strands of her DECRA project.

Dr Waterton, from the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at UWS, has received funding of $375,000 over three years to explore the way visitors construct and express identity at a range of tourism sites in Australia.

The project will examine how the heritage field is used to shape present social and cultural debates, the ways that “Australian history is remembered and forgotten, and communicated at heritage tourism sites”.

Dr Waterton hopes to include sites in her research that represent Indigenous narratives, such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and Kakadu National Park,

and others which present a ‘settler historic’ narrative. She also plans to use innovative data collection methods for the project such as auto-photography and performative ethnography, asking tourists to take photographs at the sites and later recall their impressions and memories.

Though her field of research is heritage studies, Dr Waterton’s previous contributions to research on the 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the UK showed that the investigation of issues such as the inclusion or exclusion of different groups in the management and decisionmaking processes for heritage sites contains broader insights into areas such as racism and multiculturalism.

“It allows me to think about how and what we choose to remember from the past, and what that can tell us about contemporary debates and the way we think about ourselves.”

For more information on the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) visit: www.uws.edu.au/ics

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Impacting ON the way we live

Bringing the dying home

Photo: Professor Brett Neilson

Photo taken by Ossie Emery

Digital technologies are, bit by bit, changing many aspects of the way we live and work, but what are the implications of this change? What does it mean for the way we relate to one another? And how might society be affected in the future?

Questions such as this are at the heart of the work of the UWS Institute for Culture and Society (ICS).

Bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines to develop a ‘big picture’ research program, the ICS is also investigating changes such as the shift of geopolitical power to Asia, population expansion, and the impact of urbanisation on the natural environment. It brings together academic scholarship and grounded, engaged research in partnership with communities and other organisations.

Professor Brett Neilson says, “While we are very interested in traditional academic outcomes, we also want to do things that are useful to society.”

One of the key elements of the ICS’s mission is the ‘Australian Cultural Fields’ research, which examines transformations in the social organisation of cultural activities in contemporary Australia in the light of its changing place in global processes and relations.

“We are looking at a wide array of cultural institutions in Australia from the 1970s – from museums, to the Australia Council, to the Australian Institute of Sport – and how they took on a specific kind of national ethos in moulding a distinctively Australian culture.

We are also interested in what that means in terms of a more

globalised Australia, and what is the role of social distinctions in the way that people consume various cultural products,” Professor Neilson says.

Other research is being conducted in collaboration with the recently established Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre. Dr Philippa Collin from the ICS is studying the role of online and networked media for supporting young people’s mental health and wellbeing, while Dr Amanda Third is investigating how technology can be leveraged to reach, connect and engage young people who are vulnerable to the development of mental health difficulties.

Meanwhile, the ‘Cool living heritage in Southeast Asia: sustainable alternatives to airconditioned cities’ research, led

by Dr Tim Winter and Professor Donald McNeill, is turning to the past for potential solutions to dependence on air-conditioning.

“These researchers are coming from a cultural heritage perspective to think about ways in which people in tropical climates kept cool for centuries, what kind of technologies they used, and what kind of architecture was involved. They’re looking at how those past practices might be revived or updated in ways that could save energy through their reintroduction,” says Professor Neilson.

For more information on the Institute for Culture and Society visit www.uws.edu.au/ics

Research shows that of the approximately 140,000 people who die in Australia each year, around 80 per cent wish to die at home, but only between 16 and 20 per cent do so.

Associate Professor Debbie Horsfall is leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the UWS School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Calvary Centre for Palliative Care Research, CSIRO and Cancer Council NSW to understand what happens to individuals and communities when people come together to care for each other as someone is dying at home.

The preliminary phase of the ‘Caring at end of life’ study showed that people can and do die well at home, but caring is an immense task which requires a complex network of community and servicebased support – friends, family, neighbours, work colleagues and community members willingly pitching in to help.

“Some people sat with the dying person to give the carer a break. We heard about bedside ‘happy hours’ or helping to continue family rituals and celebrations,” says Associate Professor Horsfall. “What was most important was that people provided what was actually needed by the carer and the dying person – not what they assumed, or thought was needed.”

Contrary to perceptions that supporting people to care for a dying person is always draining or isolating, the people involved in informal caring

networks found the experience transformational and it built social connections.

“Caring can contribute to social capital with carers and the cared for being part of a vibrant and growing network of relationships,” she says. “When caring generates social capital, it no longer just addresses a private need but potentially contributes to a public good.”

The study is progressing into its second phase in 2012. Service providers and volunteers have already been recruited for a series of focus groups that explore the ways that they provide assistance to the community. “Now we want to talk to carers,” says Associate Professor Horsfall.

Associate Professor Horsfall hopes that the research will inform palliative and public health policy, with the aim of positively impacting carers and caring practices, giving dying Australians a supportive, loving and more meaningful death in the place that they chose.

“The issue here is that these things are not spoken about: we don’t speak about where we want to die; we don’t speak about the joy and love and laughter associated with supporting each other; we don’t speak about death and dying much at all. Yet it’s going to happen to all of us.”

Carers who are interested in being involved with the study can contact Niki Read on 02 4736 0368 or 0437 877 232, or by email at n.read@uws.edu.au

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Understanding Shari’a Law

Glowing in the dark

Photo: Professor Bryan Turner, Associate Professor Adam Possamai and Dr Selda Dagistanli

Photo: Flourescent corals

In Australia, Islamic law or Shari’a is not formally recognised by our legal system, but Muslims who wish to abide by this law often turn to the internet to seek rulings or fatwas from scholars, imams and mullahs on issues relating to property, divorce and custody.

Partly because of its ‘underground’ nature, Shari’a is not well understood in Australia and is often portrayed in a simplistic way in the media.

Professor Bryan Turner and Associate Professor Adam Possamai from the UWS Religion and Society Research Centre are now seeking to understand more about how Shari’a is lived by Muslim communities in Australia and the United States, through a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council.

“Shari’a can be very culturally based, and given there are more than 70 ethnic Muslim groups in Sydney, there can be various understandings of what Shari’a means,” Associate Professor Possamai says.

By exploring Muslim experiences of Western and Shari’a courts, and how Shari’a is treated within Western courts, the study “will make innovative conceptual and empirical contributions to the debate about post-secular societies through the study of legal pluralism in the West”.

Fluorescence in coral doesn’t just look pretty – it may act as a defense mechanism against the impact of warming oceans and climate change. Dr Anya Salih from the UWS School of Science and Health, is exploring the phenomenon.

“When high light interacts with temperature, the impact of photosynthesising algae on coral tissues can kill the coral.

The coral expels the symbionts and turns white as a result.

That’s called coral bleaching,” Dr Salih says. “I’m looking at how fluorescent proteins reduce these stressful effects of this process.”

Collaborating with other scientists from around the world, Dr Salih is also investigating a number of other aspects of how corals utilise light energy and the biological function of these unique fluorescent proteins in coral reef organisms.

The investigation of these processes, however, has a wider benefit. The genetically expressible properties of the proteins enable scientists to be able to attach them to other molecules to be studied.

“If, for instance, you have a cancer cell and you want to study the activation of a particular cancer-related protein or how a drug might affect its activation, we can colour that protein with a coral fluorescent glow,” Dr Salih says.

The UWS Confocal BioImaging Facility, equipped with high-end microscopes and lasers, enables scientists to look inside living cells and tissues.

The US was chosen for comparative study as it has some similarities to Australia in terms of being English-speaking and a relatively new country largely populated by migrants, as well as some differences relating to the law and the treatment of religious differences.

With research to be conducted in Sydney and New York, the project will incorporate ethnographic fieldwork online to understand the discussions concerning Shari’a, interviews with Muslim lawyers and imams, and observations and analysis of cases in both secular and informal Shari’a courts.

“There is hardly any social scientific research on how Shari’a is understood and applied in the everyday life of Muslims in Australia. So with this research we want to make data available about what’s really happening, which will inform the media, government and other research,” says Associate Professor Possamai.

For more information on the Religion and Society Research Centre visit www.uws.edu.au/research

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“We can grow tissues and cells in culture dishes, express coral fluorescent proteins and fuse them to the molecules that we want to study, and then investigate their activity in living cells. Using laser microscopes, we can even track molecules and uncover cellular processes in whole corals or other living organisms, which is a very powerful technology,” Dr Salih says. “We get a three dimensional understanding of where and how these molecules move inside cells.”

While already thousands of laboratories use fluorescent proteins from jellyfish and corals in biomedicine and cell biology, their potential is only beginning to be understood.

“Even in organic computing and solar energy generation, we may be able to create advanced bio-photonic devices based on fluorescent protein from corals,” says Dr Salih.

In June, Dr Salih was an invited presenter at the premiere of the Coral ReKindling Venus film at the World Science Festival in New York, which featured some of her coral fluorescence imagery.

For more information on this research visit www.uws.edu.au/research

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Seeing the future clearly

Photo: Professor Bill Price and PhD researchers

Photo: Dr Tim Stait-Gardner with MRI

Researchers from industry and universities around Australia are flocking to UWS to use its Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS), the most sophisticated tool of its kind in Australia.

The SIMS provides analysis of the surface and near-surface composition in materials.

Dr David Nelson, SIMS operator at UWS, says, “The instrument has an extremely high sensitivity, so we can analyse almost every element in the periodic table to the parts per billion level.”

The SIMS is specifically designed as a tool for developing new and improved semiconductors – a critical component for many types of modern electronics – and understanding the processes behind them.

“It’s being used for a huge range of different applications in the nanotechnology and materials science areas, such as looking at corrosion rates for new types of metals, developing new lightemitting diodes, and creating micro-switches,” Dr Nelson says.

The UWS Solar Energy Technologies Group is investigating methods for producing clean solar-hydrogen energy, and the SIMS is a vital piece of equipment for this work.

“Most current solar cells have an efficiency of 4 per cent. But the latest technology is approaching 50 per cent efficiency,” says Dr Nelson. “So they are far more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, and the SIMS instrument is the tool that is required for understanding how we can make materials like that.”

With many specialised semiconductor companies located in Sydney, the SIMS is certainly attracting plenty of interest.

“We’re at the cutting edge of innovation with this piece of equipment.”

For more information on research at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research

Photo: Dr David Nelson

The Biomedical Magnetic Resonance facility with very highresolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is enabling UWS scientists to understand better a diverse range of problems including preeclampsia in pregnant women, breast and prostate cancer, development of animal brains, grape development and how to build better batteries.

Led by Professor Bill Price from the UWS School of Science and Health, the Nanoscale Research Group uses equipment similar to a hospital MRI, except it can produce images with more than 10,000 times better resolution.

“MRI is such an enormously rich source of information. In the clinical world, it’s one of the major tools used by clinicians when investigating a patient,” Professor Price says.

“Importantly, it is non-invasive and does not involve high energy radiation or radioactivity.”

MRI is just one branch of the very large field called ‘nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)’, and its potential applications spread far beyond the medical field and medical physics.

For example, the UWS team is using an NMR spectrometer to understand more about how lithium polymer batteries can be made more efficient, how anticancer drugs bind to DNA and to probe the association of proteins.

“In a lithium polymer battery, for example, there has to be ionic conductivity for the battery to work,” says Professor Price. “This results from the motions of the various ions – and NMR is supremely able for probing how each of the different types of ions and molecules move around and interact with each other.”

Professor Price says while the types of problems they are investigating may seem poles apart, the techniques and rules they apply have much in common.

“Whilst our applications to a layman might appear to be unrelated, for us, the thinking and experimentation at the molecular or the nano level is very similar.”

For more information on research at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research

Creating a new generation of semiconductors

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Bringing knowledge to life

Photo: Dr Rosalie Durham, Dr Robert Sleigh (CSIRO) and Associate Professor Jim Hourigan

With 62 patent properties and 17 projects in the process of commercialisation, UWS is building a reputation for delivering pioneering research which results in practical, commercially accessible innovations.

UWS Innovation, led by Dr Fiona Cameron, aims to “ensure that UWS research ultimately reaches and benefits the public”. It works with researchers to protect their intellectual property, and match them with suitable commercial partners.

One of the biggest success stories from UWS Innovation is Relok®, a unique steel technology which is incorporated into steel formwork profiles and used in structures such as office high-rises, residential apartments and airports to improve their performance.

Since being introduced to the market in 2005 in conjunction

with Fielders Australia, it has secured a 60 per cent market share. Fielders and its partner M-Metal have signed a deal with UWS to introduce the technology into Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, accelerating the product’s already impressive market penetration. The deal will allow the University and the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering to further invest in research, education and innovation.

Another commercialisation success is Qcide, a new environmentally friendly treatment for household and agricultural pests, which was developed as part of a collaboration between UWS, Southern Cross University and Bioprospect Ltd. The treatment formula is based on tasmanone, a natural insecticide derived from the leaves of a rare type of Eucalyptus cloeziana, a forest tree species naturally found in

limited areas of Queensland.

The intellectual property has been assigned exclusively to Bio-Gene Technology.

As a greener alternative to established products such as synthetic insecticides, Qcide has the potential to make significant inroads in the global market.

UWS has also developed Ion Exchange Lactose (IEL) purification technology with Dairy Australia and CSIROFood Science Australia, which allows for the purification of lactose from whey permeate in dairy processing plants.

This lactose is then used in food and pharmaceutical production. The IEL technology has been licensed nonexclusively to biotechnology company Novasep.

For more information on innovation at UWS visit www.uws.edu.au/research

Can acupuncture help fatigue?

Advances in medical knowledge, screening programs and self-detection have markedly improved the survival rate for sufferers of breast cancer. But treatments such as chemotherapy can have debilitating side effects such as nausea and fatigue.

Complementary medicine may provide some relief. Associate Professor Caroline Smith, from the UWS Centre for Complementary Medicine Research, is evaluating the use of acupuncture as a potential treatment method for women undergoing cancer treatments and suffering from fatigue.

Previous research in this area has only involved small numbers of women, with mixed results as to whether acupuncture was beneficial in relieving fatigue.

Associate Professor Smith’s study, funded by the Cancer Institute for New South Wales, involved 30 women who were randomly allocated to groups receiving acupuncture, a placebo treatment and a control group.

Over six weeks, the women in the acupuncture and placebo groups received nine treatment sessions.

“We found that women were very interested to participate in this study, and on entering the study, reported significant levels of fatigue,” Associate Professor Smith says.

The results showed that women who received acupuncture reported a reduction in their levels of fatigue after two weeks compared with the control group. After six weeks, their wellbeing improved further.

The study also included interviews with some of the women, which allowed the researchers to explore their experience in greater depth.

“For those women experiencing a benefit, they were better able to engage in other self-care activities and to start to undertake more day-to-day activities,” Associate Professor Smith says.

While the study was not large enough to show statistically significant results, it does provide a platform for further research.

“The findings are encouraging and indicate we should plan a future study involving a larger number of women, and seek funding to enable us to do this.”

For more information on the UWS Centre for Complementary Medical Research visit: www.uws.edu.au/complemed

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Why are so many trees dying in western Sydney?

Eucalypts in the endangered remnant Cumberland Plain Woodlands (CPW) in western Sydney are currently under threat from a massive infestation of psyllids – commonly known as jumping plant-lice.

Psyllids are plant-sap feeding insects, with the current infestation caused by a species of Australian native lace lerp.

Dr Markus Riegler, senior researcher from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE), is working with local councils to investigate the cause of the lace lerp outbreaks. He says the species of lace lerp infesting the CPW is specific to Grey Box Eucalypts (or Eucalyptus moluccana), and in large numbers, cause foliage and canopies to appear burnt or dead.

“It has previously been speculated that rapid changes of water availability – for example, extensive rainfall after long periods of drought – may lead to increased concentrations of amino acids in eucalypt plant-sap that can then be rapidly exploited by the psyllids and result in their extensive proliferation,” Dr Riegler says. “This is a question that we are interested to find answers for.”

Though most eucalypts can recover from a single defoliation event, repeated complete defoliation over several years will stress trees, resulting in dieback. Because of these devastating effects, local councils and communities are keen to understand the causes, how to manage infested trees, and possible preventative measures to guard against future outbreaks.

“Given that the Grey Box is a dominant tree in the endangered Cumberland Plain Woodlands, any dieback is seen as a concern for ecological and also safety reasons, in particular if defoliated and stressed trees are in recreational areas, close to houses and streets,” says Dr Riegler.

The research is supported by the UWS-Blacktown City Council Partnership Program.

“Lace lerps produce waxy secretions that act as a protective shield under which the psyllids can feed on plantsap by puncturing leaves with their mouthparts. This plantsap feeding activity results into the injection of toxins that causes necrosis in leaf tissue,” says Dr Riegler.

It’s currently unknown how many of the thousands of affected trees will die.

Psyllid infestations causing areawide tree defoliation have previously been reported for South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, with a similar outbreak in Western Sydney being reported about 15 years ago. However the exact causes for these infestations are still unknown.

For more information on the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment visit: www.uws.edu.au/hie

Photo: Dr Markus Riegler

For more information contact www.uws.edu.au/research UWS Research Services Locked Bag 1797 Penrith NSW 2751 +61 2 9852 5222 Published July 2012 © University of Western Sydney

Photos: Grey Box Eucalypt infected with lace lerps