News and views

Three Academy Fellows have taken out NSW Premier’s Prizes with chemical engineer Professor Rose Amal named the 2019 NSW Scientist of the Year.

Dr Ruth Morgan from Monash University is the recipient of the Academy’s 2020 Moran Award for History of Science Research.

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Emeritus Professor Cheryl Praeger is the 2019 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. Academy Fellows have featured each year since the prizes’ inception in 2000.

How do we get science into Australia’s culture and more connected with the business community? It’s a question that Australian businessman Peter Yates AM continues to pursue since noticing that science was largely missing from mainstream media and parts of the business community 15 years ago.

Michelle Tapper of the Academy’s Communications and Outreach team has received a Churchill Fellowship to support her to travel across the US, UK and Europe to study science video production with high profile organisations around the world.

Dr Jia Wu, an early-career computer scientist from Macquarie University has been selected by the Australian Academy of Science to represent Australia at the highly prestigious 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany from 22–27 September.

Academy Fellow Professor Branka Vucetic of the University of Sydney has been awarded the prestigious CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science for her major contributions to the science of coding theory and wireless communications that underpin much of the wifi technologies we use today. Professor Vucetic was elected to the Academy in 2017.

Research Fellow Dr Elena Schneider-Futschik from the University of Melbourne is the winner of the fourth Falling Walls Lab Australia event, hosted yesterday by the Australian Academy of Science.