Was it your parents to encourage you towards science? Or did you have other influences in that?

 

Well, they didn't have much idea about science. But they were aware that I was really interested in the refrigeration engineers who were frequent members of our household because the refrigeration systems tended to break down very easily in those days. We in fact, had about a ton of ice cream in a large container at the back, and that would have been quite an expensive loss. I used to chat to them and talk to them and so on. That was good.

 

Well, you have not ended up a refrigeration engineer. But where did your specific interest in agriculture come from?

 

Well, that came because of the several winter term breaks that I had at school that were on a sheep station, about 50 kilometres north of Balranald on the way to Lake Mungo. The wife there lived with us for a time and was a close friend of my mother. She took me up there each year. I became really enthralled by her husband, who was phenomenally able person to run a sheep station. He was very successful in that even during long droughts.

He showed me all sorts of things that they were doing, like trapping rabbits, which were extremely busy at that time.

 

What about other things that were going on the farm in those days?

 

Oh, the sheering shed, the rabbit trapping that I mentioned, the maintenance of the windmills, his ability to go to an enormous warren and put 30 or 40 traps in there and go back the next day and knew where the traps were out of 200 or 300. He just had that amazing ability.

 

Someone very adapted to their environment.

 

Very adapted to his environment.

 

He had quite an influence on you and ultimately influenced your decision to enrol in agriculture at university?

 

Yeah. His success as a farmer stayed with me for the rest of my life as an ag scientist and was reinforced by the many superb farmers that you and I have met in our professional lives.

Early mentors such as that farmer can have really profound effects on us when we reflect on it. Were there other strong influences in your school days?

Well, my mother was very upset about not being able to do the final four years of high school because she had to leave school at 13. She was very interested in education and so was my father. By then we had enough money to go to one of the premier schools in Melbourne, which was Wesley College. I found a marvellous school. It was with Wesley you detect that it might be Wowser-ish, no alcohol, certainly, and no dancing, although they had come through that, no this, no that era by then.

They were very socially conscious. By far, the most socially conscious of that class of school. They sent students out to help people, say in care homes and so on. The values that they left us with were, I think, staying with most of us and most of our lives as trying to be very caring people.

The station owner and parents and that school clearly helped set your compass towards studies in agriculture in Melbourne. What was it like in those days?

 Melbourne University? Well, it was small. There were only 4,000 students. We had the first year was science courses, that is physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In the second year, we went to Dookie College in Shepparton, about 200 kilometres to the north of Melbourne, which was a full year stay from January to December.

On farm?

On farm at the college. We had two weeks of lectures and then two weeks of doing stuff on farms, with pigs, sheep, cows, horses. We learned to harness horses, which was not useful. We had a very wet year in 1956. The broken River was about 20 kilometres wide. So, we didn't have any knowledge about growing crops.

Sounds like quite a rounded curriculum. The final two years in particular were quite broad?

Yes. The third year was mostly about scientific issues, advanced physiology, entomology, plant sciences. In the third year, we had a more general curriculum. We had sociology, economics, and agricultural engineering, which covered in fact both years.

Did any particular subject stand out as influencing the direction you took?

Well, soil chemistry was the most difficult of the subjects and Geoffrey Leeper who ran it was the most difficult of the lectures. He used to get into strive for not passing so many of the people. He was an extraordinary character. He was very smart. He had very broad interests. He taught us not only soil chemistry, but also how to think, how to write, how to understand people like Karl Popper who was the leading scientific philosopher at that time. I thought I would like to be a student of his. After graduation, I, with some trepidation, went along to his office and asked if I could be his student. He peered at me for a few moments and said, "What were your marks in agricultural engineering?" I said, "I believed I was the top," which he knew. He said, "Well, let's see what you can do."

We then started doing an aspect of the trace element, manganese, and its influence on plants. The way that changes in the environment in a given place can make it either toxic in excess or extremely deficient, which also killed plants.

That was the central thrust of the PhD?

 

It was central thrust of the PhD. We had discovered a group in South Australia near the Victorian border, where manganese was very deficient, that the farmers were perplexed that the wheel tracks grew quite a good crop, but not the ones that you'd sown.

 

Which you might think would be the opposite 

 

Which we thought was the opposite. We thought that the wheel tracks had been sufficiently squashed, that oxygen in the soil might have been scarce. That would result in a very insoluble manganese oxide, releasing the manganese ions that the plants needed. But we measured the manganese ions and found that they hadn't changed.

We started wondering about what the compaction was doing to the roots of the plants and were aware that the roots were having trouble growing through the smaller pores that the compaction caused. In so doing, forcing their way through, they had to make very close contact with the surfaces of the particles that was surrounding them.

We then thought that close contact was enabling the roots to squeeze as it were the manganese ions off the solid surface. Inspired by the work that Hans Jenny had done, who was the most notable soil scientist of his time in looking at how clay particles could exchange the ions that were adhering to them only when they got very close together.

 

I understand that this, your first PhD paper was actually published in Nature?

 

It was published in Nature. Yes. Nature published papers of slightly over a page at that time. I think they were attracted to the fact that compacted soils could be beneficial. I think they were attracted to the idea of the contact exchange.

After your PhD studies, you moved on to postdoctoral studies in the UK and Europe. How did that come about?

 

Well, I was fortunate enough to get a CSIRO Scholarship, of which there were 10 or 20 a year at that time. I went to work in the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, because one of Leeper's ... In fact, Leeper's only previous PhD student had gone there, too, and liked it. Well, I went there and I didn't like it. It was a rather mundane group that was there.

In the summer of the following year, I went there in September '63. the summer of the following year, I travelled around Western Europe, Scandinavia, Western Germany, Netherlands, and France. I became interested in what was going on at Wageningen University where there was a very good soil chemist and physicist called Jerry Bolt, who was trying to understand what happens to clay particles when they move around a bit and how they like Hans Jenny says, moved and exchanged particles and so on.

For example, if you have calcium on the clay particles, they stick together. If you have sodium, they wander away because the sodium pushes them away.

 

You say that you found the mathematics here was daunting?

 

Daunting. But just understandable in my mathematically uneducated state.

 

The theme of physics and chemistry at that stage was clear in your work. But there was a talent for mathematics also beginning to emerge?

 

Yes. Because quite simple mathematics can enable you to do a lot more things than you might have otherwise thought. Instead of waving your hands about what might be happening in a field, you can start looking precisely at what might be going on. Going back to when I was a graduate student, I became interested in how the nutrients were moving towards the roots, and how they were carried by the water that was moving towards the roots.

I wrote a not very mathematically accurate paper that was published in Plant and Soil about the same time as the paper in Nature. That was appended to my PhD thesis. I was fortunate enough in Wageningen to share a lab with a fellow called Maurice Frere from USDA, who liked to be called Mo Frere. The local Dutch people kept asking me where ... they didn't know that I had a brother, which is the French 'mon frere' of course, and almost.

He knew how to do numerical analysis of difficult equations that you couldn't deal with analytically. We worked on those. We wrote a paper that the mathematics was good at. We published that just after I came back to Canberra a couple of years later.

 

Using some early Fortran, I understand?

 

Using some early Fortran, yes, and a rather grumpy 1620 IBM computer, which involved a long night of calculation followed by spitting out about a meter of Hollerith cards, which then had to be carried to a printer. The printer would then turn those into print.

 

Hardly a supercomputer

 

No. No. But it was the first popular computer.

After that CSIRO scholarship, the guarantee a subsequent job with CSIRO?

 

Well, CSIRO expected but did not demand that one could join a CSIRO division after the fellowship was over, which it had been over for two years. But then I heard from Ralph Slatyer, towards the end of my time in Wageningen, which was roundabout July, August of '66 that he would like to offer me a job, which I grabbed with some glee.

We eventually turned up in Canberra with me, a pregnant wife and two-year-old child. We settled in Canberra quite close to CSIRO, which was easy to do at that time.

 

What was Ralph's background?

 

Ralph was a very talented scientist who worked both as an ecologist and as a plant physiologist, and he became the first Chief Scientist of Australia. That was partly because he and Bob Hawke went school together. He moved to the ANU a couple of years later, after I turned up. What was wonderful about him and about being in CSIRO at that time was that we had no financial problems, because the federal government pretty well paid for everything.

We had lots of scientific leisure, which we made very good use of. Ralph's group would meet at mid-morning, every day, those of us who were there and we would just chat. In the afternoons, we would meet with the division as a whole. The rest of the division which was 80% to 90% of the total was more interested in broad topics like hydrology, land use, and so on.

 

Ralph had been building this group in CSIRO?

 

Yes.

 

A group of people who were interested in the behaviour of plants and crops and particularly water use. What specifically did he ask you to do when you arrived?

 

Well, Ralph never asked anybody to do anything, because he was interested in trying to get people who were creative and who could become more creative and to get themselves going by talking to the rest of the group. It was spontaneous.

 

Early on, one of that group was Ian Cowan?

 

Ian Cowan had come to Canberra just after me. He'd previously been working at Rothamsted, was the great micrometeorologist of the time, Howard Penman. They were looking at how water moves from the soil through the plant to the atmosphere. Penman was the leading micrometeorologist of the world at that time. I was doing similar thinking, using numerical techniques, because I couldn't solve the equations, and neither could Ian.

But when you cut the right corners, you get the right answers. Ian and I worked together for a while in which we compared the numerical with the mathematical that he was doing, and found that they were in pretty good agreement, which was a delight, because that meant that we could use the simple mathematics rather than worry about the numerical to solve the equation.

 

This was, in particular, regard to the cylindrical geometry of roots that you have found?

 

Quite. Yeah. The cylindrical geometry requires quite a few tricks to do the mathematics on. Because when things are flowing towards them, they have to speed up as they get closer and closer into the ... They start out here. Then they have to get into there.

 

You've spent a lot of time over the next 20 years exploring how roots and soil interact to control uptake of water, and particularly when it becomes limiting. I understand your work in those early days also took you to the Ord River Project?

 

Yes. Well, another colleague that I became friends within Ralph's group was working in Kununurra, at the top of Western Australia, almost on the border was the Northern Territory. There they had created a micro-version of a possible large dam. There was a group of people there who were trying to grow cotton, because they thought that would be the best plant to grow.

But by the time we got there, one could smell the insecticide in the air. We were not so much interested in trying to grow the cotton as in trying to work out how one could most effectively use the very large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer that cotton required. That was Rob's project, which I helped with. He tried three ways of applying nitrogen.

He would either spread it or put it in irrigation water, or most importantly, to drill it into the ground as a long band to the side of the ridge that the cotton was growing on and which extended alongside in parallel with the cotton. We found that the band was by far the most economical way of using the nitrogen because none of it escaped.

 

You were focusing in on the root-soil interactions again?

 

We were. The reason that none of it escaped was that it was highly toxic, because there was so much of it there, so much of the fertilizer, that it was having an osmotic effect. The roots would approach it and they would then stop and start proliferating as the nitrogen moved from the band out to where the roots were, which was about five centimetres distant from the band.

They could then get the nitrates that was coming towards them and they slowly eat their way in to the centre. None of the nitrogen escaped, all finished up in the cotton.

 

I believe the unlikely pairing of radio phosphorus and a chainsaw were put to good use?

Yes. Well, we wanted to show that this actually happened in the field. We took a larger lump of lead with holes in it, put radioactive phosphorus in it. Put it in the hold of the plane as we went to Kununurra. We used that radioactive phosphorus to inject into the stems of the cotton plants, because we knew that the phosphorus was being sent down to the roots, not only to the roots, but as the root tips.

We borrowed a chainsaw... a long chainsaw, and we cut across the band...

 

In the soil?

 

In the soil. Right across the ridge, and then put a chest x-ray, an unexposed chest x-ray in there, left it for a day or so, pulled it out, and then developed it. Sure enough, there was this ring of wonderful little black dots showing where the root tips were there.

 

Remarkable science John, but I won't be lending you my chainsaw anytime soon. What became of the Ord River project?

 

Well, those of us who were working there at the time were very sceptical that it was worthwhile putting in the dam. The chief of the Division of Land Research was a great enthusiast for Northern Australia. He was raring to go. I think many of the politicians the time as we have many of the politicians these days were keen on developing Northern Australia. So, they went ahead.

he subsequent history, which I briefly looked up said that the dam and the irrigation system had spent one and a half billion dollars and the return was 17 cents per dollar. So, things are still looking crook.

 

CSIRO's work on cotton subsequently moved south with some success.

 

Yes. With a great deal of success, because they had a superb breeder and a superb agronomist, and they moved to Narrabri.

I forgot to mention earlier that the cotton was being eaten rapidly by bollworms, which they could not control. But in the less humid environment of Narrabri, they could make a living there. They still needed to spray many times until BT came along which was a gene extracted from soil microbe that when put into a plant would kill any caterpillars when they ate the plant.

Just going back to Ralph Slatyer, who clearly had a significant impact on the direction of your work. What observations would you make about his leadership style? How did it come to influence your leadership?

 

Well, he made sure when we had our morning and afternoon meetings nobody could sit down. People mingled and the discussions that went on were much richer than what happened when a group of mates sat by a table and talked about the weekend football scores. On top of that, he thought we would all enjoy playing croquet on the lawn in front of our building up there. Not the top of Black Mountain but the top of CSIRO — we used to play croquet there. We would discuss all manner of other things at the same time.

 

I've heard you describe this as scientific leisure. I think it's a great term. It's a dream for my generation of scientists.

 

A lost dream?

 

I hope not! Can you expand on what you see as the benefits of scientific leisure?

 

Well, we had an administration whose job was to support the scientists. Nowadays, we have an administration that creates impediments for the scientists. Perhaps they're following orders, because there's a huge amount of legislation that is required now, especially health and safety, which we never know what the records are on health and safety.

The current administration had offloaded administrative chores like buying something onto us now as the scientists, and it takes us half an hour to order something which would have taken three or four minutes for one of the administrators in the old CSIRO.

 

John, these gatherings of people came to influence your thinking on other interactions in biology. Can you elaborate on that?

 

Well, the form of social interaction intrigued me. I began to think about hierarchical structures and the interactions between different levels or scales in such structures. For example, laboratory research on gas exchange by plants could be studied for its own interest, or it could be thought of in the context of field-grown plants, and how modifying rates of gas exchange might help increase yields of crops.

In relation to hierarchical structures, I chanced upon a book called Beyond Reductionism, which contained a set of papers given at a remarkable conference organized by Arthur Koestler in Alpbach, Switzerland in 1968. The first paper in that book, written by Paul Weiss dealt with the hierarchical structure of living organisms, and was in part based on the idea of general systems theory that was pioneered by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who wrote the second paper in that book. Weiss emphasized the difference between machines and hierarchical systems in this way.

I quote, "In a system, the structure of the whole determines the operation of the parts. In a machine, the operation of the parts determines the outcome. Both processes occur in living systems." Weiss's paper was revolutionary. It guided me at least subliminally for the rest of my career. I doubt that Ralph was overtly aware of general systems theory, but his leadership certainly did reflect it.

In my world of crop agronomy, you're perhaps best known for your work on effective water use by crops. How did that work initially developed?

 

One afternoon, I was talking to Henry Nix at the general get together. He told me about the work that he had been doing in Biloela, which is the northern tip of the wheat belt in Australia. He told me that the yield of the wheat over several seasons that they were looking at it was proportional to the amount of water contained in the soil at about the time of flowering.

That was a blinding flash of light, because it was a perfect example of Louis Pasteur's dictum, that chance favours the prepared mind.

 

It really changed the direction of your research?

 

It changed the direction of my research, because I started to think, together with Henry, about how we could save water for use during the more important times of flowering and grain filling, and not use it up during the vegetative phase.

 

Seems obvious now. But how did you follow up on that eureka moment?

 

Well, I started doing some experiments in which I tried to emulate the field experience of plants by growing them in one-meter-long cylinders of soil which had about the same amount of soil in that they would get in the field, and could hold about the same amount of summer rainfall, which is what the crops in Biloela require. Same amount of water, as they had in the field.

The seed of wheat has got about five seminal roots, as they're called, which emerge during germination, sometimes more, but about five. They, in half of the pots that I was using, were allowed to grow freely into the soil. The other half, I prevented four of the five seminal roots from getting into the soil, and that left only one.

The idea was that with reducing the size of the root system, we would somehow save water by reducing the growth rate of the plants for use during the later flowering and grain filling times.

 

Did your hypothesis on the badly tortured wheat plants win out?

 

It did win out, but it caused us considerable troubles of thought, because the total root system of the tortured plants was greater than that of the un-tortured ones. How could that be? Well, we then started thinking about the geometry of what was going on and became aware that all of the water used by a large plant had to move through a vessel in the seminal root, in the center of the seminal root that was only 60 micrometers wide.

That water was moving, as it moved in from the roots to the leaves, at one meter per second, which is very fast. Indeed, is a world record, I would say. That gave us the idea that we could, instead of worrying about the number of the roots, we would reduce the size of the vessels that were carrying the water, and such cylindrical vessels have to obey Poiseuilles law, which states that the conductance of water through those tubes depended on the fourth power of the diameter, that is, if you have the diameter, you would reduce the conductance by a factor of 16.

 

I believe that later led on to a breeding program to seek such plants with narrow vessels, which we may come back to later. But you're moving to plant physiology following this led to a sabbatical in Cambridge?

 

Yes. It's quite stunning to look back on it. To be told by the Chief that given that you're moving into physiology, we think you should go to Cambridge to spend a year. I don't think anything like that happens these days, and went to Cambridge and to the botany school there and picked up a reasonably good understanding of what was going on in the crop plants that I was interested in.

At that time, I became interested in not only the movement of the water from the soil and the things that carried to the leaves, but to the backwards flow of nutrients, including carbohydrates from the leaves to the roots, and then became interested in how fast the leaves would be growing.

My contact was with Enid MacRobbie in the Botany School, who was a leader in studying the transport of water, and metabolites across membranes. My interest in the vascular system of wheat roots had extended to the phloem, which carried sucrose from the mature leaves to the growing areas. The rate of flow being determined by its transport across membranes.

Thus five years after returning to Australia, we found ourselves back in Britain. During my 12 months there, I learned much about general plant physiology from my new colleagues. I also met and kept in touch with many plant physiologists from UK and Europe. That knowledge, which is all that I brought back with me, gave me many ideas to build on in relation to agriculture.

 

Then, on your return to Australia in 1972, I believe you found a much-restructured CSIRO and that prompted another career shift.

 

Yes. When I came back, we were told that the Division of Land Use Research was no more, and it became a Division of Land and Water working on the large scale. The few of us who were physiologists at that time, were attracted to the Division of Plant Industry by Lloyd Evans.

 

Back to the theme of more efficient water use by plants?

 

Returning to the idea of breeding wheat plants had had narrow xylem vessels in their seminal roots. I asked Lloyd if it was possible to recruit an appropriate breeder? He said, "Well, yes, but we'll have to get some money from the Wheat Research Council to do that," which was being run by Max Day. Max didn't think much of that to start off with.

But eventually, we got his permission. Well, I have an addendum in midstream, which was that Max had refused us for two years. Lloyd happened to be going up in the lift in the old headquarters of CSIRO with Max, fortuitously, and Max said, "You haven't put in an application this year." Lloyd said, "It's been on your desk for a fortnight."

It was clearly successful?

 

It was clearly successful. I think it was good that we had to wait a bit longer because we were lucky to get Richard Richards as breeder who had just finished his PhD in Western Australia, working on canola, which was having a bad time with disease in that era. He came and we started exploring the possibility of reducing the size of the xylem vessels, the tubes that carry the water to the leaves in the upper part of the root system.

We looked at thousands of plants, which we could do quite quickly, two or three a minute. We found varieties that had narrowed xylem vessels. Richard made use of those to cross into existing varieties to see if that would help them save water during the vegetative phase of the crop for use during later on.

He showed that, although we weren't up in the tropics, at the time, that water was saved by the manipulated plants, and they did give larger yields during dry years.

 

After that you're interested in making better use of water when it is in limited supply continued to grow. I think you had been doing some pot experiments too. Investigating optimum use of water when it's in limited supply?

 

I'd been doing more pot experiments because I was interested in making an equation, which would explore the water use by crops in three components. That is the water supply for the plants, the ability of the plants during the vegetative stage to make effective use of that water in producing biomass. The third was the harvest index, which is the ratio of the grain yield to the biomass.

There were three separate components of grain yield in water limited environments. I did experiments which convinced me that trade-offs between those various ... those three were quite weak, which means that instead of just thinking we need more water at flowering time, we could start looking at getting more water, making it more effective in producing biomass, which is the least important and also how much water, what proportion of the total water supply would be needed to give you the highest harvest index.

I showed that that was 30% of the total water supply.

 

John, that equation is perhaps one of the most influential for breeders and agronomist alike, providing different but potentially additive targets for improvements in both genetics and in agronomic management. Were you aware at the time of the impact it was going to have?

 

Not in the least. I wrote it as a short article in an Australian agricultural journal, Institute of Agricultural Science. I wrote it for my colleagues, many of whom were highly sceptical, thought I might convince them. But then, Champ Tanner, who was visiting us in 1981, took it back to the United States with him. I also gave a longish talk at a meeting in the Midwest in 1983, which became a paper that was fairly highly cited, I think, because of that equation. It occupied the world.

It certainly has, and I guess I came to know you as the head of the Crop Adaptation Group in Plant Industry in Canberra. How did you come to lead the Crop Adaptation group at CSIRO?

 

Well, I came to lead it because Lloyd had resigned. Jim Peacock was his successor. Jim asked me to lead a program called Crop Adaptation. The various groups in Crop Adaptation were scattered all over the site. The first thing we had to do was to build a building, which could accommodate us all, or almost all. That we did, and it was built in 1984 and we all moved in.

My role I saw then was that the subprogram leaders were all superb. I saw my role as ensuring that they talked to each other, and everybody talked to each other. I tried to replicate the technique that Ralph used of having morning meetings that many people came to, in which people could not sit down.

We used to have a quite a large meeting in a dry chemistry laboratory at which we had a brief seminar by one of the people present. We would discuss things about that. That resulted in many new ideas being voiced and coming to fruition.

 

Scientific leisure living on?

 

Yes. Yes, at that time there was because Jim understood scientific leisure. He understood that no program leader was worth his or her salt unless they were spending 50% of their time on their own research.

 

It was around this time that you met Rana Munns?

 

Yes, I did. I met Rana Munns at a conference in Perth in 1980. She had just finished working with a Dutch mentor. She was a postdoc. She was looking for a job. I was intrigued by the work that she and Hank Greenway, who was her mentor they had been working on what happens? Why does the growth of plants reduce when you give them a shot of salt water?

What was especially intriguing was that the most sensitive parts of the plants were the growing leaves. That was what stopped immediately. But there was no sodium chloride in the expanding cells. Why were they not expanding?

 

I believe you had developed an ingenious new apparatus that was central to unravelling the answers to some of these questions?

 

I had. That was just coming to maturity, I would say, at about the time I was talking to Rana, the time we had Champ Tanner here and that was in 1981. That was the year that Australia had the National Botanical Congress. There were many visitors around the place at that time. This apparatus involved growing plants in pots that could be put inside a pressure chamber.

The pots had a thick aluminium plate on the top with a small hole drilled through the centre to enable one to let the roots grow through there while the leaves were above it. Then it was locked into the pressure chamber. The pressure could be controlled by applying a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen to the roots. We had the wherewithal for precisely controlling the water status of the leaves. What was that doing in the salt-affected plants?

One of the things we did was to show if we put a lot of salinity in the soil that was going to slow down the growth of plants, we could overcome the osmotic effect of that salinity by applying an equal pressure that cut it off. But the surprising thing was that that didn't affect the reduced rate of growth of the plants. They kept growing slowly.

In effect, even when the shoots were as happy as they could be from a point of view of water supply, they still slowed their growth?

Not quite as happy as they could be, because at that stage, we were just getting rid of the osmotic effect of the salt. Nevertheless, the plants slowed their growth and that led us to discover, and several others were discovering at the same time that roots when they found themselves in an inhospitable space would send inhibitory signals to the leaves to stop them growing.

We didn't know then and we don't know now what those signals are, but we can prove that they exist. The same is true for growing plants in drying soil. That is not using salinity. The same thing occurs. The plants slow their growth rate, even though the leaves are at their happiest, as you mentioned. The leaves were on the point of bleeding xylem sap out into the air.

 

This is some feed forward response, presumably?

 

Well, yes, we thought of it as a feed forward response because it is a response that predicts rather than reacts to. It's telling the plant that even though there is still plenty of water and nutrients at your disposal, that you're taking measures to prepare for that condition worsening.

We also showed that if you compacted the soil to make the soil a bit harder for the roots to go through, the effect of the drying soil became much earlier because then it was the hardness of the soil rather than the dryness of the soil that was sending the inhibitory signal.

 

John, at the time, you were working on the theory of water uptake by roots, and you were focused on the speed at which water would flow to the roots, as you said and the density. That theory would predict that most of the available water would be taken up in just a couple of weeks. That certainly wasn't the case from field observations. Why do you think the water uptake was so much slower?

 

Well, there are guesses. One obvious reason is that the roots are not uniformly distributed in the soil. But we're often clumped into cracks or large soil pores, often termed biopores. If that was so, the flow of water through the roots, and its uptake was determined more by the distribution of the pores, and how well connected the roots were to the pore walls.

The implication of these biopores on root growth, water uptake and crop production was at the centre of many subsequent collaborative studies with soil scientists and agronomists for more than a decade, particularly as it seemed to be responsible for the slow growth of crops and a no-till farming, which was being widely adapted by farmers at that time.

No tillage meant more biopores and harder soil in between. Some inhibitory microorganisms could also colonize roots in these pores or in the hard soil between them which ushered in an increased interest in microscopy and targeted microbiology focused right around the surface of the roots.

While you were managing the program, there were other sabbaticals?

Yes. I was invited to go and work with the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee, Scotland for six months in 1991. I set out to explore the physiology underlying the growth rate of roots and leaves. I became especially interested in the expansion of the young cereal leaves, as I mentioned before in relation to salinity. That interest was stimulated by a remarkable meeting in Corfu Island off the west of Greece, a meeting that was entitled The Mechanics of Swelling.

I met there an extraordinary collection of world leaders, including Nobel laureate Nobel-Laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who helped me develop a model for the rearrangement of hemicellulose polymers in the walls of growing cells. The growing cells in cereals have got rings of cellulose around them. Those rings are held together by these hemicellulose polymers, because the cellulose is straight and hemicellulose is crooked.

The model thereby explained the initial surprising behaviour of the growing leaves whose elongation rate doubled when pressure was applied in the root chamber, thereby doubling the turgor in the growing soils, that is the pressure within the growing cells, but only transiently before returning to the previous elongation rate after about a quarter of an hour, despite having much higher pressures inside them.

The reversal so applied, removing the pressure resulted in the leaves stopping their growth totally for a few minutes or so, but only transiently before the growth rate returned to what it had been at the start of the experiment.

That behaviour...

That behaviour was described by the model that de Gennes helped me build on the role of the hemicellulose links between the cellulose rings in the cells.

Scaling back up from cell walls back up to field crops your interest in on farm translation of research became very first hand when you joined the GRDC panel, the Grains Research and Development Corporation

It certainly did. In 1995, I resigned from leading the crop adaptation program because I'd become frustrated by the reluctance of GRDC to support the excellent projects in CSIRO Plant Industry, especially at the time that Allan Green and Surinder Singh were starting on their work for improving the quality of the oils in Lenola, which subsequently resulted in the extraordinary achievement of getting canola with omega-3, the real omega-3 fatty acids, which are extremely valuable.

I threw my hat into that ring. I was fortunately elected to the GRDC southern panel, which had 10 very able members in it, half of whom were farmers. It was influential in many ways, in getting closer to farmers and their advisors in crop genetics and in novel agronomy. John, you are part of all of that.

Although the membership was supposed to occupy about one month a year, in fact, it required at least three months. It was very successful that six years that I was there.

Yes. You remained on that panel right up until close to your retirement in 2002. Since then, you've clearly been a very active retiree and as an Honoury Research Fellow with CSIRO for over 20 years. You've had ongoing and significant impact both in CSIRO and in other organizations. Maybe which of those activities since retirement have meant the most to you and why?

Well, I wrote several critical reviews and brought together themes that had been of interest to me but weren't immediately obvious that they were connected. The most important theme, I believe, has been a widespread failure in the agricultural research community to recognize the hierarchical structure of agricultural plants, the layers in which the plants can be thought of operating.

This has resulted in a slippage of understanding about how important it is to be aware of how high levels in the hierarchy, for example, a crop canopy compared with an individual plant can constrain the behaviour in the lower more detail levels, so that experiments at those lower levels become misguided because they are not aware of the constraints that the higher levels make on them. A leaf with a surface constrains everything that's with inside it, and if they try to do something else, they can't.

These misunderstandings, I guess, that can be avoided when gas exchange people are playing croquet ...

Indeed.

... with aspiring cotton agronomist from the Ord, for example. I believe you also, as well as reflecting on your own research programs and an interest, you also were involved in reviewing research programs at other Institutes during that time.

Yes. Well, I was asked to take part in a review of one of the CGIAR Institutes of which there are about 15 or so International Agricultural Research Institutes scattered around the world. I was asked to take part in a group that was reviewing the International Center for Agricultural Research in the dry areas whose bailiwick ran from the western side of Morocco, across North Africa, through the Middle East, to Central Asia, in that semi-arid area.

The most important point that we made at that time during that review, which involve a couple of weeks to start off with, and then we went home and came back and it broke up to look at various outposts. The most important thing was the very poor agronomy that was going on at the time. That poor agronomy had [major] consequences.

Because in North Africa, at least, wheat is a staple food and they only grew half of the wheat that they needed. Two years after our review, the price of wheat doubled. There were riots in all the cities because of that. Tunisia started rebellion, and that started spreading eastwards to the other North African countries through to the Middle East.

The consequences of that are still with us in Syria. We had ACIAR, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, having a superb team working on improving the agronomy, and we're doing so by introducing direct tillage, which had the great opportunity of being flexible in sowing time, and that in itself, increased yield by 10%.

I guess your other big activity has been here at the Academy

True. But before moving on to that, I also worked as a consultant for CGIAR [Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research] about 10 years ago. I undertook high level reviews of several of their programs, whether they existed or were prospective. Those programs, the CGIAR was trying to get different institutes to interact with each other and the programs that are reviewed. I thought would not enable that.

So, involvement with ... I was elected to the Academy in '94. My first memory of being a Fellow was attending a meeting of the Dining Club. The Fellow who had been running the dining club resigned, and they were looking for somebody else and couldn't find anyone. I said that I would be delighted to do it, which I did for 9 or 10 years. We had initially wonderful meetings.

We had very good speakers, and we had very good dinners that followed the talk. But as the years went by, our clientele slowly withered away, because the clientele were people considerably older than myself who came up in an era of scientific leisure, where they could be curious about things.

From the mid-'90s, on the pressure on university staff was so great that they couldn't entertain any curiosity about anything except what they were working on, and what the next project proposal was. We never got any of those coming along. Eventually, I asked Suzanne Von Caemmerer, if she would like to take over from me and I would take over the role of essentially MC with those meetings, and we lasted another few years before we just couldn't afford the rising prices with the falling numbers of people who turned up.

That was the dining club. Then in 1999, David Curtis, a former President, asked me if I would take over from him as the Chair of the Board of Historical Records of Australian Science, which I did, which he had been the Chair of. It was an interesting, though time consuming task to find authors to write scientific obituaries and to encourage them to do so in a timely fashion.

I served on the board for nine years, until four years ago until Chris Dickman took over. Then, in 2015, I was asked to represent the Academy on the National Library of Australia's Fellowship Advisory Committee. They have about 10 fellowships a year for senior academics to come and look at various bits of the enormous supply of archives at the National Library holds to develop a theme that they had been interested in.

The Fellowship Advisory Committee also dealt with summer students who would be PhD students and they would be there for only six weeks or so. It was a very gruelling exercise. I mean, they've got 150 applicants. They've got 10 who get in and getting unanimity or close to unanimity amongst the committee was pretty good at the beginning, but it became more difficult.

I retired from that a year early, because I felt that anything that I had to offer was pretty well random and wouldn't have any effect on who was selected. But those 10 people would be asked to give full lectures at the Library at the end of their time there. Then you get a couple of 100 people in the Library at that time. I was just amazed at what the National Library, what things they could do with archives, which you would never have imagined had you not been told.

John, getting back to agriculture and the challenges of food production in the face of climate change seem to me to call on a whole new generation of John Passioura's to continue the search for physiological understanding of genetic and agronomic adaptations.
What is your or advice to young people interested in a career in agricultural science focused on global food security?

 

Well, I hate to say it, but it's not very enthusiastic and why? Well, the pressure on young scientists to publish in high impact journals is much too great. It's frequently much too displaced. Many of these journals are high impact, because they allow scientists with trivial projects, to review each other's papers.

They do so without any idea of the paper’s agricultural significance. For example, there are about 5,000 or 6,000 papers — 5,000 when I wrote a review on translational research in agriculture, a couple of years ago. These molecular biologists put yet another gene into another batch of Arabidopsis looking for drought resistance or salinity resistance.

Five thousand of them then achieved nothing, one did. That one required 20 more years work to go from what these papers were to getting into the field and getting into farmer's fields. None of the others can do that. While I was writing that review, I came across a paper written in a small news sheet, associated with the National Academy of Sciences in the US by a fellow called Mark Neff, who wrote a devastating criticism of the irrelevance of much of the work that is being done and being treated as high impact with the title of How Academic Science Gave Its Soul to the Publishing Industry.

How you make dents in the armour of most of the publishing industry is almost beyond academic science, I say. It is beyond academic science. I think that the only hope is for funding agencies, like the NAS [?], or the ARC [Australian Research Council] of Australia not to be swayed by claims of utility in research proposals without such proposals being reviewed by other scientists who know what utility means.

Then not only would you cut out the rubbish, you would enable those who had something of real utility to go to work on it and the people working on the rubbish to actually start looking at functional aspects of the systems that interest them rather than putting another gene in to no effect.

 

I guess which comes back to that connectedness to people working at different scales.

 

Exactly.

Just moving to life outside work?

 

55 years in Canberra accumulates many diverse friends and colleagues of great importance as one's family. For example, my wife, who's Kaye Johnston, was prominent in the women's electoral lobby in the early '70s, which I took an interest in and later when she became a guide at the National Gallery and the Classics Museum at the ANU [Australian National University] and she was also prominent in helping manage and make costumes for the Canberra Dance Theatre when that was active, at a time when Graham Farquhar was one of its members.

I took interest in all of such activities, which greatly expanded the number of friendships. But going more widely than that, I've picked up many friends ranging from heavyweights in politics, for example, John Kerin, who was Minister for Agriculture in the Hawke years, and Michael Keating, who was the boss of Prime Minister and Cabinet during Paul Keating's premiership and being members of the Australian Garden History Society in Botanic Gardens and you pick up a lot of people of very diverse backgrounds in all of that.

There is, I think, a now discredited number called the Dunbar number which says 150 people is the most that you can stay friends with. But it turns out that it's much more variable than that.

 

Looking back on your career, do you sense a unifying theme?

 

Well, I do. Let me try and convince you. In my scientific life, I have been a soil chemist, a soil physicist, a biophysical chemist studying the polymer chemistry of cell walls in leaves that controls how fast leaves grow. An agronomist, a pre-breeder, a substantial contributor to plant and soil water relations, a co-discoverer of inhibitory signals from roots that modulate the behaviour of the leaves, and an analytical philosophy. Does that sound bewildering?

Well, all of those areas of concerned improving agricultural productivity, the transitions have been almost seamless, largely because of serendipitously chancing upon related phenomena that I thought I could usefully explore, as in Pasteur's Chance Favours the Prepared Mind. Similar stories apply to most of my colleagues, including you, especially you.

That's not the random bouncing around that inspires these transitions. It's the curiosity about what other people are productively doing in one scientific or even administrative neighbourhood. Finally, I'd like to thank the many visitors that local colleagues and I have attracted over the years. These include many from the northern hemisphere, especially Champ Tanner, John Boyer, Joe Ritchie, Paul Jarvis, Mark Westgate, Missy Holbrook, Ken Shackel, Wendy Silk, Grant Cramer, Thomas Gollan, Ian Dodd, and the highly entertaining Ulrich Zimmerman.

One of those visitors came and stayed. That was Margaret McCully, a Canadian who is the very eminent microscopist, who was invited to come to the Division of Plant Industry by the GRDC because of her immense knowledge about roots and microorganisms in undisturbed field soil. That came out of a meeting of the Southern panel of the GRDC that I was on at that time.

I talked to the other members of that saying, "This woman is amazing, and it would be good to invite her because they were just becoming interested in microbial underground work." She decided when she arrived to retire from Carleton University in Ottawa.

 

In the same way you retired?

 

Yes, thereafter stayed as an honorary Fellow with CSIRO for many years, during which time she organized annual one day meetings, including visitors from overseas, meetings on microscopy that attracted full houses. They were fantastic.

 

I can't imagine that you don't have a next move planned?

 

My next move will be in the next few weeks. I hope to take my experimental equipment with me, which would otherwise be buried in the skip. COVID disrupted the experiments that I was doing with that equipment on your soil samples, which I couldn't finish. I can now resume those experiments to find out why it is that deep roots take up water so slowly, which is totally at odds with the simple physical chemistry of water movement in soils.

 

Well, I might join you, John, and good luck with that project. Thanks for sharing these insights in your career. As one of the many who has benefited tremendously from your friendship and mentorship, I can assure you that your focus on rigor and relevance in science lives on in all of us, as does your plea for us to find time for more scientific leisure from which creativity springs. Thanks a lot.

 

Thank you, John.

Professor Lidia Morawska FAA, Queensland University of Technology

Professor Lidia Morawska’s 30 years of innovative work brings us closer to breathing safely. The fundamental science that she pioneered and advanced in the multifaceted field of air pollution is critical for humanity to understand pollution and its impacts, and to build bridges translating science into public health applications. This work laid the foundation for the 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) Global Air Quality Guidelines, which included recommendations on ultrafine particles from combustion processes for the first time, providing authorities around the globe with the basis to develop regulations to control this major pollutant to improve human health and save lives. Professor Morawska’s seminal work on particles from human respiratory activities became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, in recognition of the importance of aerosol transmission, and convincing the WHO and national regulatory bodies to review public health policies and practices from schools to workplaces, making these environments safer for more people around the world.

Professor Andrew Holmes AC FAA FRS FTSE, University of Melbourne

Professor Andrew Holmes is recognised for his world-leading contributions to the chemical synthesis of organic and polymeric substances for use at the interface with materials science and biology.

Plastics have traditionally been used as insulators or lightweight structural components. However, as a result of Professor Holmes’s contributions in developing plastics that emitted light when sandwiched between electrodes connected to a power source, the world now recognises that these materials can serve as semiconductors for flat screen TVs, for organic solar cells and in transistors.

Professor Holmes led the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium that delivered highly efficient solar cells and showed that they could be printed on plastic.

In the area of cell biology, Professor Holmes’s research group collaborated with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute to attach their synthetic signalling molecules to beads that could be used as fishing lines to identify many key proteins involved in colon cancer cellular signalling.

Dr Richard Manchester FAA, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science

Dr Richard Manchester is a world leader in pulsar research. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars with beams that sweep past Earth forming regular pulses of radio emission. These regular pulses can be used to investigate a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, including tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity, to search for gravitational waves from super-massive binary black holes in the early universe, to probe magnetic fields in our galaxy, and to explore the properties of supernova explosions. He has led the teams that have discovered more than half of all known pulsars, mainly using the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, and used them to explore the universe around us. Among the pulsars they have discovered is the only known double pulsar which has given the best confirmation so far that Einstein’s General Relativity gives an accurate description of gravitational interactions in strong-field conditions.

2017

Professor Barry Ninham AO FAA, Australian National University

Professor Ninham’s discoveries have had a revolutionary impact on the field of colloid science, a discipline that underpins chemical engineering, cell and molecular biology and nanotechnology.

He is the developer of the accepted theory of amphiphilic molecular self-assembly, a process that underlies modern materials science.  It is a fundamental principle of self-assembly in nanotechnology, impacting on modern molecular-based technologies, and slow-release technology for in-vivo pharmaceutical drug- delivery. Five decades of work by Professor Ninham has revealed that the discipline of physical chemistry that informed our intuition on a myriad of processes was flawed to the extent that it failed to take account of key  “ion specific effects” and dissolved atmospheric gas.

He was Founder and Head of the Applied Mathematics Department at the Australian National University (ANU) and presently works with Professor Richard Pashley and a team of graduate students at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). They discovered and are  implementing  simple new technologies for purification of recycled water, desalination, low temperature chemical  reactivity, catalysis, and removal of  pollutants such as arsenic.

2015 

Professor Kurt Lambeck AO FAA FRS, Australian National University

Professor Lambeck is a globally pre-eminent geophysicist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding Earth’s rotation, the strength of Earth’s mantle and its role in plate tectonics, and the complex global geometry of sea level variations associated with ice sheet melting. His work has fundamentally influenced a range of disciplines from geophysics to oceanography, glaciology and archaeology.

2013 

Professor Kenneth Freeman FAA FRS, Australian National University

Professor Ken Freeman is widely acknowledged as the world’s most eminent galactic astronomer. The first to identify the necessity for dark matter in galaxies, he has shaped our current understanding of the dynamics and structure of galaxies. Over the past decade, Professor Freeman has co-established the field of galactic archaeology, where fossil records of stars are used to trace the formation of the Milky Way. His ideas have helped launch the one billion dollar European satellite, GAIA (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics). GAIA will work with a purpose-built instrument on the Anglo–Australian Telescope to fossick for stars that will chronicle the history of the galaxy since its birth more than 13 billion years ago. Professor Freeman has supervised more than fifty PhD theses, and he truly is a father of Australian astronomy.

2011 

Professor Brian Kennett FAA FRS, Australian National University

Brian Kennett has made major contributions to the understanding of the Earth using seismological methods, adding geodynamic insight to an unusual combination of theoretical, numerical and observational skills. He has made seminal advances in understanding the Earth’s internal processes, ranging from studies of reflection seismology to the free oscillations of the Earth. In addition, he has pioneered the development of influential new methods for understanding in physical terms the propagation of seismic waves in complex media and made significant innovations in inversion methods for geophysical problems.

2009

Professor Bruce McKellar, University of Melbourne

Bruce McKellar has consistently provided leading edge research in physics, influencing a number of fields of particle physics. This has included important work on weak interactions in the nucleus, which led to the development of the 'Tucson-Melbourne Potential' with his collaborators. He devotes much of his energy to the scientific community in general, through teaching, training of students and post-doctoral fellows, and through his service to the University of Melbourne and key scientific institutions.

2007

Professor Peter Hall, University of Melbourne

Peter Hall is a leading international researcher in theoretical and applied statistics and probability theory. He has made substantial contributions to nonparametric statistics over a 25-year period. Peter has had a massive influence on the development and assessment of the bootstrap method. He has made very important contributions to smoothing methods in statistics, and has introduced practical smoothing parameter-selection methods in a variety of settings. He also developed novel theoretical arguments to explain why some approaches are more variable, or more biased, than others. Peter’s research on fractal-based statistical methods for quantifying surface roughness has also been groundbreaking.

2005—R.D. Ekers
2002—A. McL. Sargeson
2000—D.V. Boger
1998—W. Compston
1996—W.R. Blevin
1994—N.S. Hush
1992—B.D.O. Anderson
1990—J.S. Turner
1988—R.D. Brown
1986—J.N. Israelachvili
1984—B.H. Neumann
1982—R. Hanbury Brown
1980—A. Walsh
1978—A.E. Ringwood
1976—C.H.B. Priestley
1974—J.P. Wild
1972—A.J. Birch
1969—K.E. Bullen
1967—F.J. Fenner
1965—J.S. Anderson
1963—J.C. Eccles
1961—M.L. Oliphant
1959—F.M. Burnet
1957—J.L. Pawsey

Dr Fengwang Li, University of Sydney

Dr Fengwang Li is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney and a Flagship Program Lead at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of Carbon Dioxide, celebrated for his innovative contributions to sustainable chemistry. His pioneering work in CO2 electrolysis harnesses renewable energy to convert CO2 into ethylene, a key component in plastics, offering a groundbreaking solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Dr Li’s research is particularly relevant as Australia grapples with the harsh realities of climate change. His discovery not only supports a circular economy by recycling carbon but also contributes to a net-zero emission future. His leadership in this field earned him the 2023 Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Researcher. His work is a testament to the potential of electrochemistry to create valuable products from CO2, transforming the way we address climate change and supporting a sustainable economy and everyday life in Australia.

Professor Yao Zheng, University of Adelaide

Professor Yao Zheng is an internationally recognised chemical engineer focused on the principles of catalysis and energy materials chemistry for green hydrogen production – a vital component for both environmental and economic sustainability and key to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. By harnessing renewable energy sources, green hydrogen can be utilised in fuel cells for electricity generation and electrochemical processes to synthesise various commodity chemicals, such as ammonia, methanol and oxygenates, as alternatives to fossil fuels. Professor Zheng and his team discovered they could directly produce ultrapure hydrogen from raw and untreated seawater by electrolysis, instead of requiring rare highly purified deionised water. This groundbreaking technology can be scaled up to industry-level applications and pilot plants. These processes hold significant potential to drive towards greener industries and reduce pressure on freshwater availability in Australia, and in turn, revolutionise Australia’s green hydrogen industry. His cutting-edge work is part of the essential wave of disruptive and transformative innovation and research aimed at building more sustainable societies.

Associate Professor Rona Chandrawati, University of New South Wales

Associate Professor Rona Chandrawati is internationally recognised as an emerging leader in the fields of nanosensors and nanoparticle-based drug delivery. She has achieved world-class – and frequently first in world – research results in the synthesis and development of colourimetric nanosensors and nanozymes for nitric oxide delivery. As the country’s leading researcher in colourimetric polymer sensor technology, her patent-pending nanosensors have enabled the detection of target analytes without the need for specialised equipment; indeed, her colourimetric nanosensors are highly sensitive, with quantitative and qualitative results able to be determined based on colour changes visible to the naked eye. These have been used to monitor food spoilage and contamination, contributing to reducing the nation’s $10 billion worth of edible food waste each year. Furthermore, her synthesis of nanoparticles and nanozymes for nitric oxide delivery have significant therapeutic implications, particularly for the treatment of glaucoma – a condition affecting 1-in-10 Australians.

Professor Tianyi Ma, RMIT University

Green solutions are urgently needed to harvest, store and utilise renewable energy sources. The effects of climate change and energy shortages have become an urgent issue for our society. Non-sustainable human activities, such as the overuse of fossil fuels, have affected the environment in an irrecoverable way. Professor Tianyi Ma’s research addresses these issues using a function-directed materials fabrication involving rich surface chemistry and delicate nano-architecture; the materials are used for key energy-related catalytic reactions leading to efficient renewable solar energy, electricity, and chemical energy conversion. Lab-scale catalytic reactions of kilogram-scale hydrogen, methane, ethanol and other value-added chemical production have successfully been driven by pure renewable energy; this can be up-scaled to industry-level demonstrations and pilot plants. Professor Ma’s numerous novel initiatives have led to scientific breakthroughs positively impacting society by enabling alternatives for industry to move towards renewable energy sources.

Associate Professor Yuning Hong, La Trobe University

Associate Professor Yuning Hong develops chemical probes to detect dysfunctional cells. Proteins are the major component of cells in the human body and are essential for the maintenance of many of its functions. When the protein quality control process in the cell factory fails, the ensuing proteins that are not folded properly can not only lose their original functions, but also damage the cells. At worst this can lead to conditions such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases. With the aid of her chemical probes, Associate Professor Hong studies how these proteins are generated and how they damage healthy cells. Her goal is to develop tests for the early diagnosis of, and treatments for, dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Associate Professor Debbie Silvester-Dean, Curtin University

Associate Professor Debbie Silvester-Dean is a global leader in the field of room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs), a new class of salt-like materials that are liquid at unusually low temperatures. Her research is focussed on their application as superior electrolytes in electrochemical reactions. Specifically, she has developed robust gelled sensor materials containing ionic liquids to detect toxic gases and explosives. These overcome the drawbacks of liquid-based electrolytes and will soon be tested in vehicles used in the WA mining industry. The sensors make people safer at home and work and can be used in various applications, including fumigation, refuelling, exhaust monitoring, and entering confined spaces. Associate Professor Silvester-Dean studies the fundamental behaviour of dissolved materials in RTILs. The results are used worldwide to understand electrochemical reactions, mechanisms, kinetics, and gas behaviour. They inform designs for batteries, capacitors, and transistors, as well providing smart materials for miniaturised, low-cost, high-performing sensors.

Associate Professor Ivan Kassal, University of Sydney

Associate Professor Ivan Kassal develops new theoretical and computational tools for simulating the dynamics of complex chemical systems, especially those where quantum effects make conventional calculations difficult and time consuming. He has designed algorithms that would allow future quantum computers to dramatically accelerate the simulation of chemical processes, as well as designing quantum simulators, purpose-built devices for solving particular difficult problems. His methods have been widely used and implemented experimentally, contributing to chemistry and materials science being recognised as the likely first applications of quantum computers. He has also studied the transport of energy and charge in disordered materials that lie at the boundary between quantum and classical behaviour, making them difficult to describe. Associate Professor Kassal’s contributions have included explaining quantum effects in light harvesting (and how to engineer them to improve performance), discovering significant quantum effects in photosynthesis, and clarifying fundamental mechanisms of how organic solar cells operate.

Associate Professor Elizabeth New, University of Sydney

An understanding of the fundamental chemistry of the body offers new insights into many of the key questions in medical research, including the location of disease-causing chemicals or drug molecules, the perturbation of chemical environments in disease, and the role of chemical signalling molecules in health. Associate Professor New's research focusses on developing chemical tools that advance the understanding of the chemistry within cells. She prepares fluorescent sensors that emit light to visualise biochemical changes in the body caused by disease, lighting up where and how the body is experiencing oxidative stress. Her principal focus is on the diseases of ageing, where she explores the action of antioxidants in countering oxidative stress, but her sensors have found application across many fields of medical research. Associate Professor New has reported ten new sensors, one that is capable of indicating the effect of copper levels in Alzheimer's disease and another shows how oxidative stress is essential in fat breakdown and even in embryonic development. She has also developed sensors that observe how cancer treatments such as cisplatin have effect within the cell.

Dr Lars Goerigk, University of Melbourne

Dr Goerigk works in the field of Density Functional Theory (DFT), a major computational chemistry technique used routinely by chemists to support experiments and predict their outcomes. Currently, DFT suffers from the large dilemma that hundreds of methods with varying accuracy exist, which makes their reliable application difficult. Dr Goerigk's work helped solving this dilemma by providing new guidelines that enabled easier and more robust computational strategies. His methods now belong to the most accurate in the field. He used them to provide chemists with new insights into the role of how interactions between molecules affect the outcome of chemical reactions. His other contributions include the development of an improved way to determine biomolecular structures, more reliable analyses of reaction mechanisms, and predictions leading to the development of novel smart technologies. Dr Goerigk's work has had substantial international impact and will influence how chemists will use DFT in the future.

Associate Professor Amir Karton, University of Western Australia

Due to major advances in theory and high-performance supercomputer technology computational quantum chemistry has become one of the most powerful means for examining chemical processes at the molecular and atomic levels. Today computational chemistry is working hand-in-hand with experimental techniques to tackle challenging chemical problems. Associate Professor Amir Karton has played a leading role in the development of quantum chemical methods for highly accurate calculations of chemical properties such as reaction barrier heights. These methods have been thoroughly tested and demonstrate a high level of applicability over a wide range of chemical systems and their properties. Due to their unprecedented predictive capabilities, these methods have been widely used over the past decade to understand and predict chemical processes. He has applied these methods in his own research for explaining the mechanisms of challenging reactions, predicting molecular properties, and designing new molecules.

2017

Associate Professor Deanna M. D'Alessandro, The University of Sydney

Associate Professor D'Alessandro's research is delivering new insights into an exciting area in nanoporous molecular materials, namely, their electronic and conducting properties. These fundamental advances have enormous potential as the basis of new technologies for a diverse range of applications including electrocatalysis, sensing and solar energy conversion. In addition to her work in the area of theoretical and experimental aspects of electron transfer, for which she has gained international recognition, she has played a major role in the development of new nanoporous materials for the capture and conversion of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. A common theme of her research has been a desire to tackle significant scientific challenges by probing fundamental chemical questions.

2016

Associate Professor Cyrille Boyer, UNSW

Associate Professor Boyer has established himself as an authority in the field of polymer science, responsible for the development of innovative new methods of polymerisation as well as new materials for therapeutic and diagnostic application. Amongst his many research achievements in polymer chemistry, he demonstrated that chlorophyll and light could mediate and control the polymerisation of functional macromolecules. This is an important step-forward for the synthesis of macromolecules using bio-resources. He has also developed multimodal nanoparticles capable of delivering therapeutic molecules (such as chemotherapy drugs) that could be tracked using magnetic resonance imaging.

2015 

Professor Chengzhong Yu, The University of Queensland

Professor Yu is an internationally recognised materials scientist who has made significant contributions in the innovation, design, preparation and application of novel nanomaterials.

He has developed new strategies to design functional nanostructured composites and is working on a diverse range of applications for these materials including novel platforms for the delivery of vaccines, genes and drugs for human and animal healthcare, innovative approaches for biomolecule enrichment and the synthesis of functional materials for water treatment and lithium ion batteries.

2014

 Associate Professor Richard James Payne, The University of Sydney

Associate Professor Richard Payne is internationally recognised for his contributions to peptide chemistry and drug discovery for neglected diseases. He has pioneered the development of important new synthetic methodologies that have enabled access to modified peptides and proteins of considerable complexity. He is also recognised for his contributions to medicinal chemistry where he has discovered, through innovative research advances, a number of lead compounds for the treatment of tuberculosis, malaria and cancer.

2013 

Professor Sébastien Perrier, The University of Sydney

Professor Perrier is at the forefront of the design of a wide range of state-of-the-art functional polymeric materials by careful manipulation of their molecular structure. These materials have a wealth of applications, from commercial products in the personal-care industry to health and medicine. His research considers the environmental and social impacts of both the materials and the chemical processes by which they are prepared, including sustainable processes for the synthesis of polymers and 'green' materials with a low impact on the environment.

2012 

Dr Pall Thordarson, University of New South Wales

Dr Pall Thordarson has made outstanding contributions to molecular devices and materials using supramolecular and bioconjugate chemistry. He uses nanotechnology inspired by or ‘mimicking’ biological systems to create smart gels and bio-devices driven by sunlight. His smart gels, formed by self-assembly, are designed to help anti-cancer drugs kill tumorous cells, reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. His light-driven bio-devices are targeted to the creation of better biosensors for medical applications, as well as combining waste treatment with renewable energy production.

2011

Associate Professor Martina Stenzel, University of New South Wales

Martina Stenzel designs and fabricates nanoparticles based on specialised polymers in order to deliver drugs to their targets. Using innovative combinations of polymer synthesis techniques, she creates new nanoparticle architectures with attributes which avoid the pitfalls of targeted drug delivery, thereby enhancing chemotherapeutic effectiveness. These achievements in developing the materials of nanomedicine have been widely recognised internationally.

2010 

Associate Professor Michelle Coote., Australian National University

Michelle Coote has played a leading role in adapting computational quantum chemistry as a research tool for the field of free-radical polymerisation, and has developed a robust and accurate methodology for this purpose. The predictive capacities of these techniques seem particularly powerful and are already having a major impact on the field. She has exploited this methodology in her own research to explain the mechanism of several important polymerisation processes, to develop better kinetic models, provide user-friendly guidelines for catalyst selection, and design new control agents and new types of polymerisation reactions. In just a few years, she has established herself at the forefront of this new and rapidly developing field of chemistry, helping to transform computational polymer chemistry from a qualitative tool into a respected and reliable technique that is capable of generating accurate results. Along the way she has advanced our knowledge of fundamental radical chemistry, with implications well beyond the polymer field, and helped to make practical improvements to polymer synthesis and design.

2009 

Dr Stephen Blanksby, University of Wollongong

Stephen Blanksby has made significant contributions to the field of gas phase ion chemistry and mass spectrometry. He demonstrated the stability of previously uncharacterised molecules and elucidated the fundamental thermochemistry and reactivity of transient neutral and ionic species in the absence of solvent and counter-ion effects. Stephen has applied discoveries in gas phase ion chemistry to develop new tools for analysis, particularly in the rapidly emerging field of lipidomics.

2008

Dr Stuart Batten, Monash University

Stuart Batten has made significant and original contributions in the area of crystal engineering. He was a member of the group that pioneered the design of coordination polymers, focusing on the use of trigonal three-connecting ligands. He helped to discover a new class of magnetic materials based on the dicyanamide ligand. He has also developed a naming system to describe the ways networks interpenetrate, which has been adopted by researchers worldwide. His latest research includes the design of 'nanoballs' that have magnetic and photomagnetic features.

2007

Professor Thomas Maschmeyer, University of Sydney

Thomas Maschmeyer is renowned for his ground-breaking research in materials and catalysis which led to his meteoric rise in stature within the international chemical community. His guiding principle of ‘selectivity tuning by active site design’ underlies his discoveries from pharmaceutical synthesis to process intensification and biofuels. Thomas’ leading role in the establishment of the combinatorial catalysis company Avantium was instrumental in the listing of the Australian Biodiesel Group on the Australian Stock Exchange.

2006

Associate Professor Michael Sherburn, Australian National University

Michael Sherburn is a talented synthetic chemist, developing powerful new methods to achieve efficient chemical synthesis. These new methods have been applied to the synthesis of natural products and designed structures, that are potentially important in medical treatments. His research group has created superbowl container molecules to capture and release drugs and chemicals. These molecules have potential in drug delivery, for removing environmental toxins, catalysing chemical reactions and allowing new chemical purification. His group has developed ingenious methods to synthesise polycyclic natural products, including the anti-cancer agent, podophyllotoxin.

2005—F. Caruso
2004—C.J. Kepert
2002—G.Q.M. Lu
1998—S.C. Smith
1995—S.H. Kable
1992—W.D. Lawrance
1989—C.J. Drummond

Professor David Lindenmayer AO FAA, Australian National University

Professor David Lindenmayer is an international authority on conservation and landscape ecology. He has discovered novel ways in which key drivers of landscape change interact to affect biodiversity, ecological processes and ecosystem condition. Through a pioneering series of large-scale, long-term studies in forests, plantations and agricultural environments, he has uniquely demonstrated how pre-existing landscape conditions combine with new kinds of landscape transformation to shape temporal and spatial patterns of species decline and recovery at multiple scales (from individual trees to sites, landscapes and regions). Professor Lindenmayer has also discovered mechanisms through which species respond to multiple natural and human disturbances. With his unique perspectives across an array of ecosystems, he established innovative strategies for the management of biota and ecosystems in Australia and globally. He has also developed new conceptual models and approaches for designing experiments and other kinds of studies to quantify the effects of multiple, interacting factors on biodiversity.

Professor Steve Simpson AC FAA FRS, University of Sydney

Professor Steve Simpson has revolutionised the scientific understanding of swarming in locusts, with research spanning neurochemical events in the brains of individual locusts to continental-scale mass migration. Professor Simpson, with colleague David Raubenheimer, has also developed a powerfully integrative framework for nutrition called the Geometric Framework, which he devised and tested using insects. The Framework has since been applied to a wide range of organisms, from slime moulds to humans, and to problems from aquaculture and conservation biology, to dietary causes of human obesity and ageing. Since 2012, Professor Simpson has applied his biological and biomedical research and knowledge to ease the burden of chronic disease in humans through a unique, cross-disciplinary initiative at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.

Professor Marilyn Renfree AO FAA, University of Melbourne

Australia is home to a unique assembly of mammals—the marsupials and monotremes. Professor Marilyn Renfree has pioneered modern research on their reproduction, development, evolution, conservation, molecular and comparative genomics for 40 years, demonstrating their importance for biomedical research as well as providing novel conservation and management approaches for our iconic kangaroos and koalas. Her lifetime passion for these long-neglected Australian fauna has led to pioneering discoveries and insights that challenged assumptions and opened up new areas of biomedical research internationally. Professor Renfree’s research program has advanced our understanding of embryonic development and placentation, how the development of their embryos can be suspended, and how their extraordinary lactation is controlled. Her most important contributions have been to the field of sexual differentiation, overturning established paradigms and showing how genes and hormones interact during early development, providing new understanding of what makes a male and a female mammal—leading to new clinical guidelines and making a contribution to our understanding of human sexual development as well as that of other mammals.

Professor Geoffrey Burnstock FAA FRS, University College London and Melbourne University

Professor Geoffrey Burnstock is internationally recognised for the discovery of purinergic neurotransmission, a novel signalling system between cells that is of central importance for many biological processes. His 1976 discovery challenged established concepts of the biology of cell messengers and neurotransmission. More recently, he has focused on a cell communication process that takes place in metabolism known as purinergic signalling. This research has had an impact on the understanding of pain mechanisms, bone formation and skin and bladder cancer and kidney disease. He continues to be an inspiration for many and his vision and creativity have enabled and driven the research of a very large number of laboratories around the world. He has had a very large impact on this field by his initial discovery and its elaboration, involving challenge to Dale’s principle of ‘One nerve terminal—one transmitter’.

2016

Professor Graham D Farquhar AO FAA FRS, Australian National University

Professor Graham Farquhar is an outstanding plant scientist whose innovative work has had far reaching impact on our understanding of plant function in a changing world. Combining mathematical rigour and biological insight, his highly cited research has been applied at vastly different scales, from how plants partition their resources between water use and photosynthesis to global interactions between vegetation and the atmosphere. His work has enabled development of crop varieties that are better equipped to cope with changing environmental conditions, particularly those associated with drought.

2014

Professor Jerry Adams FAA FRS, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Professor Adams has advanced understanding of cancer development, particularly of genes activated by chromosome translocation in lymphomas, through molecular analysis and transgenic mouse models. By clarifying how the Bcl-2 protein family controls the life and death of cells, he and his colleagues have galvanized the development of a promising new class of anti-cancer drugs that directly engage these cell death regulators.

2012

Professor Ruth Hall FAA, University of Sydney

Ruth Hall has made a substantial and highly influential contribution to our understanding of how antibiotic resistance genes are acquired by gram negative bacteria. This is important because antibiotic resistance develops by resistance genes coming into a pathogen from elsewhere. She discovered and characterised experimentally one of the central mechanisms of gene movement found in bacteria and is continuing to work on novel antibiotic transfer systems. More broadly, her work has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of how genes of all types are mobilised by bacteria and hence how bacterial genomes evolve.

2010

Professor David Vaux FAA, La Trobe University

David Vaux is best known for identifying the proto-oncogene bcl-2 as an inhibitor of cell death, thus launching the field of molecular biology of apoptosis (programmed cell death). His subsequent work on the 'Inhibitor of Apoptosis' family of proteins has underpinned the development of a novel group of compounds currently undergoing clinical trials in humans for the treatment of cancer, placing him at the forefront of biomedical science.

2008

Professor Richard Shine, University of Sydney

Richard Shine has an outstanding and influential research history in ecology, evolution and conservation spanning over 30 years. He has a very high international profile with over 500 papers published in international scientific publications. He is an accomplished communicator producing books for general audiences and speaking frequently at international conferences. Professor Shine's influence on Australian vertebrate biology is unparalleled and has transformed the fields in which he works.

2006

Professor Jenny Marshall Graves, Australian National University, Canberra

Jenny Graves has a highly acclaimed international reputation for her work in mammalian genetics and comparative genomics on Australian marsupials and monotremes. Her research has raised profound questions about human biology and mammalian evolution. She has made extensive ground-breaking discoveries relating to the cell cycle, control of DNA replication, evolution of the mammalian genome and the function and evolution of sex chromosomes. She graduated from Adelaide University and received a Fulbright award to undertake a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Jenny was selected as the 2006 laureate for the Asia-Pacific region L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for women in science. She is a Research Director at the Australian Research Council Centre for Kangaroo Genomics.

2003—B.J. Marshall
2001—G.R. Sutherland
1999—M.R. Bennett
1997—S. Cory
1995—P.M. Colman
1993—D. Metcalf
1991—F.W.E. Gibson
1989—W.J. Peacock
1987—D.A. Denton
1985—F.J. Fenner
1983—D.R. Curtis
1981—J.M. Rendel
1979—G .J .V. Nossal
1977—W. Hayes
1975—R.N. Robertson
1973—E.J. Underwood
1971—J.F.A.P. Miller

Professor Matthew England FAA, University of New South Wales

Professor Matthew England is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on the ocean’s role in climate, spanning time-scales from seasons to millennia. His field of research spans physical oceanography and climate dynamics, where he has written seminal papers on global water-mass formation, ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions, modes of climate variability, and ocean overturning processes. His work has afforded profound insights into the circulation of the Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans and their role in global and regional climate. He has quantified the Southern Ocean overturning circulation and its impact on climate, in both present and past climates; he identified the critical importance of the Southern Annular Mode in driving trends and variability in the coupled ocean – ice – atmosphere system; and he has shed new light on the teleconnections between the tropics and Antarctica.

Professor John Church FAA FTSE, UNSW Sydney

Professor John Church is one of Australia’s leading oceanographers whose theoretical and observational work on the dynamics of the oceans has led to a deep understanding of the physics of recent sea-level change, both globally and for the Australia–Pacific region. He has played a leading role in establishing a consistent and robust record of sea level change—integrating the traditional tide gauge records with satellite radar altimetry data; identifying its temporal as well as regional variability; developing a deep understanding of the processes driving this change; and providing quantitative projections of future change under different climate scenarios that he has been able to observationally test. His work has contributed to the assessments of the science of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and to the World Climate Research Program, and in the public debate on the evidence and underlying science of climate change.

Professor Dietmar Müller FAA, University of Sydney

Professor Müller is internationally renowned for leading the construction of a Virtual Earth Laboratory to ‘see’ deep into Earth in four dimensions (space and time). This laboratory draws together custom software, workflows and data to produce open-access models of Earth’s dynamic history. It has been accessed by users from 183 countries and many disciplines. Novel applications led by Professor Müller include the development of a deep-time global sea level model and combined geodynamic, tectonic and surface topography models unravelling the origins and history of continental landscapes, environments and sedimentary basins. He showed how the uplift of the eastern Australian highlands is dominated by dynamic topography due to plate–mantle interaction. He recently developed an innovative approach for understanding the deep oceanic carbon cycle by showing how variations in ocean bottom water temperature and tectonic cycles drive fluctuations in seafloor weathering, crustal CO₂ storage and atmospheric CO₂ content.

2017

Emeritus Professor Ross William Griffiths FAA, Australian National University

Professor Griffiths’ influential research in fluid dynamics has focused on the fundamental physics of phenomena of importance in geophysics. He has contributed to the understanding of thermal and multi-component convection, the dynamics of rotating density-stratified flows, the instability of ocean currents, the formation and interactions of ocean eddies, and the global overturning circulation. He has influenced solid-earth geophysics through studies of convection in the Earth’s solid mantle and its interactions with the Earth’s surface, and provided dynamical insights in physical vulcanology through studies of cooling, solidifying lava flows. His contributions to oceanography, geophysics and geology have been made using careful theoretical and laboratory studies of the fluid dynamics and have involved collaboration across multiple disciplines.

2015

Professor Trevor J McDougall FAA FRS, University of New South Wales

Professor McDougall is internationally renowned for his ground-breaking work on ocean mixing processes and the thermodynamics of seawater. He has identified new mixing processes; defined neutral density surfaces along which mesoscale eddies mix; shown how lateral mixing processes should be included in ocean models; and redefined all the thermodynamic variables used in oceanography. His discoveries have improved ocean climate models and changed the way oceanographic data are analysed, increasing the accuracy of the science and confidence in models of the coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice climate system.

2013

Professor Roger Powell FAA, University of Melbourne

The continental crust is a patchwork of metamorphic rocks transformed deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Understanding the physical conditions in which such metamorphic rocks form is the main focus of Professor Roger Powell’s research. Through the application of the principles of equilibrium thermodynamics to mineral systems he has provided both the methodological framework and the computer software that allows metamorphic geologists to recover the formation conditions of metamorphic rocks. using equilibrium thermodynamics, mathematics and statistics

2011

Professor Ian Jackson, Australian National University

Ian Jackson’s research has centred on laboratory study of the physical properties of geological and analogue materials under conditions simulating those of the Earth's deep interior. This has involved the intensive development of novel methods for the measurement and analysis of elastic and near-elastic behaviour related to the speeds and attenuation of earthquake waves. Such laboratory-based insights find application in the interpretation of seismological models for the Earth’s internal structure in terms of temperature and chemical composition.

2009

Professor Malcolm McCulloch FAA, Australian National University

Malcolm McCulloch is a geochemist who has made major contributions to both the study of the solid Earth and environmental issues. He has had a major impact on studies of the evolution of the Earth’s crust. Recently he has studied sea-level changes and past ocean temperatures, the impacts of environmental change on coral reefs through nutrient fluxes into the ocean, and the effects of increasing ocean acidity associated with higher atmospheric carbon-dioxide. His work on material incorporated into the skeletons of corals on the Great Barrier Reef has demonstrated the way in which the progress of human settlement in Queensland has affected the nature of the waters reaching the reef and has already begun to influence water-catchment management.

2007

Professor Ian McDougall, Australian National University

Ian McDougall has an extraordinary record of scientific achievement in the fields of plate tectonics, geochronology, planetary noble gas evolution, and the origin and evolution of humans. In addition to making fundamental contributions to plate tectonics by precise dating of the large-scale movement of oceanic plates, his work provides the benchmark for our understanding of hominid evolution in East Africa. This is exemplified by his recent dating of the new species Australopithecus anamensis, a finding that provides new insights into our understanding of the genesis of our own species.

2005—B.L.N. Kennett
2003—A.J.W. Gleadow
2001—B.E. Hobbs
1998—J.R. Philip
1995—K. Lambeck
1993—A.E. Ringwood
1990—D.H. Green

Professor Anthony Weiss AM FTSE, University of Sydney

Professor Anthony Weiss is the international leader on studies and applications of the key human elastic protein needed for resilience and recoil in skin and blood vessels. His scientific innovations have facilitated its commercial translation in one of Australia’s largest healthcare transactions. Professor Weiss’s scientific leadership has defined tropoelastin’s shape, elucidated how cells respond to tropoelastin through specific molecules called integrins and their binding mechanisms, defined how to modulate self-assembly, and articulated the rules governing this assembly process. He has created intricate elastic architectures tailored to specific biomedical applications that orchestrate cell growth and enhance tissue repair.

Professor Tim Senden, Australian National University

Professor Tim Senden is a physical chemist whose pioneering research has provided new understanding of surface phenomena at the nanoscale, developing methods to quantify colloidal and molecular forces. For two decades, he was involved in the development of novel applications of radioactive nanoparticles for clinical use, which received strong commercial sponsorship leading to clinical trials. From the 2000s, Professor Senden was part of a major translational activity that continues to develop a novel imaging and analysis platform based on X-ray microtomography, leading to new insights into complex granular and porous materials. This activity has greatly enhanced applications in topics spanning papermaking, carbon sequestration, composites, and mineral and hydrocarbon extraction. Following an industry consortium of 23 energy companies, Lithicon was spun-off and became one of the most successful ANU companies.

Professor Calum Drummond FTSE, RMIT University

Professor Calum Drummond has made outstanding contributions to advancing the fundamental understanding of the key factors governing molecular assembly, and particle and surface interactions in liquids. A hallmark of his research has been the use of sophisticated high-throughput preparation and characterisation techniques to fast track the creation of materials, and the determination of the structure and properties of materials, at the nanoscale. This fundamental research in chemistry has enabled the development and commercialisation of advanced high-performance materials for economic and societal benefit. The materials have been applied in diverse areas including energy storage, medical therapy and diagnosis, household consumer and industrial large-scale uses.

2016

Scientia Professor Martin Green AM FAA FRS FTSE, UNSW

Professor Green is an acknowledged world‐leader in field of photovoltaics. He has published extensively and influentially, made many highly significant contributions to the knowledge base of the field, and successfully established a world‐class research hub that is responsive to Australian needs in the photovoltaics industry. Several generations of his group’s technology have been successfully commercialised including, most recently, the Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC) that produced the first 25% efficient silicon cell in 2008 and accounted for the largest share of new manufacturing capacity added worldwide in 2014. His fundamental and applied research has led to, and will continue to lead to significant economic benefits both in Australia and worldwide.

2014

Professor Min Gu FAA, Swinburne University of Technology

Modern technology has supported the growth and prosperity of global economies but it presents significant challenges including the information explosion, energy security and provision of cost-effective healthcare. Since it relies on light rather than electronic signals, photonics can help meet many of these challenges. As a pioneer in photonics at the nanoscale, Professor Min Gu has developed green nanophotonic innovations which have significant benefits including low energy consumption big data centres, early cancer detection and environmentally-friendly solar cells.

2012

Professor Kevin Galvin, University of Newcastle

Professor Galvin is the inventor of a new technology, the Reflux Classifier, which is having very significant industrial impact in gravity separation, beneficiating fine coal and dense minerals. The Reflux Classifier consists of a novel fluidized bed incorporating a system of parallel inclined channels. With closely spaced inclined channels, shear induced inertial lift conveys the relatively low density particles with the fluid flow, while the denser particles sediment, sliding down the inclined surfaces.

Professor Galvin developed a major R&D collaboration with Ludowici Australia over a 10 year period, producing a definitive description of the complex physical processes involved in the separations, and basis for applying the technology in the design of a broad range of applications. He is the Director of the Centre for Advanced Particle Processing and Transport and is well known in both the academic and industrial worlds for his outstanding contributions to his field, gravity separation.

2010

Professor Aibing Yu, University of New South Wales

Aibing Yu is an authority in the areas of particle packing, particulate and multiphase processing, as well as simulation and modelling. His research in the field of particle or powder technology, and the modelling of particulate systems, has greatly expanded the scientific knowledge base and has been extensively applied. His work has led to significant economic benefits in mineral, metallurgical, chemical and material industries, most notably steel and coal.

2008

Dr Alan Reid, Former Director of CSIRO Institute of Energy and Earth Resources

Alan Reid has achieved international recognition in the areas of complex chemistry relating to mineral processing, the solid state chemistry for solar collector systems and in the statistics and stereology of mineral particle systems. His research has contributed significantly to Australia's prosperity through the creation of a solar energy absorber surface, AMCRO, which is widely used in Australia's solar panel industry, and also in the development of an automated mineral analysis system, QEMSCAN, which has had major financial benefits for mining companies internationally.

2006

Professor Graeme Clark AC, University of Melbourne.

Graeme Clark is internationally recognised for inventing the Bionic Ear, the first multiple channel cochlear Implant. His pioneering research on electrical stimulation of the auditory pathways led to the development of the prototype multiple-channel cochlear implant which was implanted in a research volunteer in 1978. Since then, the implant has brought hearing to more than 50,000 deaf people, including 20,000 children, in over 120 countries. He founded The Bionic Ear Institute in 1983 and continues to refine the implant so that patients now understand significantly more speech, and severely and profoundly deaf children can develop near-normal speech.

2003—G.J. Jameson
2001—K.G. McCracken
1998—T.W. Healy
1996—R. Woodall
1994—H.K. Worner
1991—W.J. Trahar
1989—D.H. Solomon
1987—A.L.G. Rees

Professor Richard Hartley FAA, Australian National University

Professor Richard Hartley has made important and pioneering contributions in the area of computer vision, both theoretical and applied, especially in the mathematical underpinnings of the field. He is one of the founders of the research field of multiview geometry, which is the technical foundation behind the computation of digital 3D models from sets of images or videos. This technology allows construction of models of cultural or archeological sites, as well as city and anatomical models. It also facilitates robot navigation in complex environments, and production of real (tangible) models of objects through scanning and 3D printing. The goal of his recent research is to provide a theoretical basis for ensuring that the models are correct and accurate. In one of his notable contributions he has identified the exact conditions under which available data is sufficient to allow unambiguous model creation. This work relies on advanced methods of algebraic and projective geometry.

Professor Mathai Varghese FAA, Adelaide University

Professor Mathai Varghese has made highly influential contributions to the field of geometric analysis, which relates geometric, analytic and algebraic properties of (possibly infinite dimensional) manifolds. Among these are his co-inventions of Fractional Index Theory and Projective Index Theory that have received international recognition for explaining the mystery of the analytic counterpart of the A-hat genus. His recent joint work extending the Fractional Index Theorem to infinite dimensional loop spaces is also of immense significance. His joint body of work proves the conjecture that fundamental quantization commutes with reduction in the noncompact case. Also seminal is his joint work on twisted analytic torsion, where an analogue of the Cheeger-Muller theorem is proved, establishing the equality by using a new combinatorially-defined twisted torsion. A catalyst for much activity in the area is his joint work formulating the magnetic gap-labelling conjecture, which labels the spectral gaps of certain magnetic Schroedinger operators on Euclidean space. Evidence for the validity of the conjecture is given in 2D, 3D and for principal solenoidal tori in all dimensions, which is itself a breakthrough.

Professor Alan Welsh FAA, Australian National University

Professor Welsh has developed useful new methodology, derived the properties of these and other methods and clarified relationships between different statistical methods, all in a particularly wide variety of problems. He has developed innovative new models for count data with many zeros and compositional data, including for longitudinal and clustered forms of these data. He has made important contributions to inference, robustness, the bootstrap and model selection for mixed models. His research on applications of smoothing methods to clustered data demonstrated that remarkable improvements can be achieved by taking proper and careful account of the dependence structure when constructing a smoother. Professor Welsh contributed to resolving how to do maximum likelihood estimation for sample survey data and, in ecological survey analysis, he made especially important contributions to distance sampling and occupancy modelling. All this work, and more, has the characteristic of theoretical depth combined with substantial practical relevance.

2017

Dr Frank Robert de Hoog FTSE, CSIRO Data61

Dr de Hoog is recognised internationally as having made highly original and insightful contributions to the advancement of applied, computational and industrial mathematics, and has contributed substantially to the mathematics profession. The importance and significance of his theoretical and applied contributions, and their flow‐on contributions to the advancement of science and to improving the efficiency of industrial processes, have been recognised by various awards.

The impact of his industrial research has been exceptional in terms of the speed of implementation by industry and the subsequent contributions to Australia’s export economy.

2015

Professor Gustav I Lehrer FAA, University of Sydney

Professor Lehrer has made highly influential contributions to algebra and geometry. Among the highlights are his co-invention of the theory of cellular algebras in the decade’s most highly cited Australian mathematical work, his development of “Howlett-Lehrer theory” to solve decomposition problems in algebra and geometry, and his development of “Springer-Lehrer theory”, with geometric and algebraic applications. His recent joint solution of the second fundamental problem of invariant theory has resolved a question of 75 years standing.

Professor Alan G R McIntosh FAA, Australian National University

Professor McIntosh works at the boundary between harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, two pillars of modern mathematics and physics. He is famous for having given with his collaborators the final answer to the Kato conjecture, a question raised in 1961 which puzzled specialists for 40 years. The techniques that he and his co-workers have developed have revolutionised the way we analyse the fundamental operators of physics.

2013

Professor Matthew Paul Wand FAA, University of Technology Sydney

Matt Wand’s main research focus is non-linear statistical models and methodology for high-dimensional and complex data, in the face of rapid technological change. Much of this research incorporates ongoing developments in Machine Learning. His contributions are multifaceted and involve applications, theory, methodology and publicly available software. Whilst most of Wand’s research is generic, areas of application that have driven some his research include public health, computational biology and the natural environment.

2011

Professor Colin Rogers FAA, University of New South Wales

Colin Rogers has made major contributions in the detection of hidden invariance and symmetry properties in nonlinear mathematical systems descriptive of complex physical processes. He is recognised as a leading world authority on Bäcklund and reciprocal type transformations and has demonstrated their extensive application in nonlinear continuum mechanics in such diverse areas as elasticity, magnetogasdynamics liquid crystal and soliton theory.

2009

Professor (Edward) Norman Dancer FAA, University of Sydney

Norman Dancer is an expert in nonlinear analysis and nonlinear differential equations. He has made important contributions to bifurcation theory, to degree theory in cones and to nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations and their applications. He has introduced many new techniques and used them to solve old classical problems, including problems in water waves and combustion theory. His ideas have had a major effect on nonlinear analysis internationally.

2007

Emeritus Professor Eugene Seneta, University of Sydney

Eugene Seneta has done much seminal work in probability and statistics in connection with branching processes, the history of probability and statistics, and in such diverse areas as slowly varying functions, Bonferroni type bounds on probabilities of unions of sets, on modelling of the price of a risky asset, and in the scaling of Higher School Certificate marks. The implications of some of his research are considerable. The algorithm which Eugene produced for scaling Higher School Certificate marks in the early 1980 was later used to determine the New South Wales Tertiary Entrance Rank.

2005—R.P. Brent
2003—J.H. Rubinstein
2001—A.J. Baddeley
1998—A.J. Guttmann
1996—N.S. Trudinger
1994—P.G. Hall; C.C. Heyde

Professor Di Yu, University of Queensland

Professor Yu is an immunologist whose research focuses on the function of T cells. He is internationally renowned as a leader in follicular helper T cells, a specialised subset of T cells that essentially control B cells to produce antibodies. His landmark discoveries reveal the key molecules (transcription factors and post-transcriptional regulators) and pathways (differentiation and cell death) for T cell function in health and diseases. Based on his fundamental research breakthrough, he partnered with physician-scientists and led clinical research on lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, allergic rhinitis, influenza and HIV infections, which have enabled new and improved diagnoses and therapies for autoimmune, allergic and infectious diseases, and the improvement of human vaccine efficacy.

Professor Mark Dawson, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Professor Dawson is a clinician-scientist whose research spans the breadth of basic discovery science to translational medicine and clinical trials. He is internationally renowned as a leader in epigenetics, which is the study of the processes that regulate access to the cell’s DNA template for gene expression, DNA repair or DNA replication. Epigenetic processes are conserved in all animals and plants and underpin normal development, tissue regeneration and ageing. When these processes are corrupted by DNA mutations, diseases such as cancer result. Professor Dawson’s ground-breaking research has provided several novel first-in-class cancer therapies which he has taken from laboratory discovery through to clinical application by leading several international clinical trials as Principal Investigator.

Associate Professor Michele Teng, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

Associate Professor Teng’s research aims to harness the immune system to fight cancer. Her group performed the first preclinical experiments demonstrating that scheduling of immunotherapy before surgery to remove a tumour (called neoadjuvant immunotherapy) was much more effective in eradicating metastatic disease, compared to giving immunotherapy (called adjuvant immunotherapy) after surgery. This seminal finding served as the rationale to set up new comparative trials of neoadjuvant and adjuvant immunotherapy in many human cancer types. Recent neoadjuvant clinical trials of various cancers have verified the translatability of her research.

Professor Nicholas Huntington, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and Monash University

Using cutting-edge screens whereby each gene of the genome is deleted individually in white blood cells, Professor Huntington established that the gene Cish impaired white blood cells from responding to the growth factor, IL-15. By deleting Cish in NK cells, his team made a breakthrough discovery that Cish acted as a ‘checkpoint’ or switch that shutdown the ability of NK cells to become activated and kill cancer cells. As such, ablation of this gene in pre-clinical models prevented melanoma, breast, prostate and lung cancer metastases from developing and reduced the onset and growth of solid tumours including sarcomas, breast and colon cancer. The discovery’s breakthrough status was sealed when inhibiting Cish function alone was more effective than the current gold-standard immunotherapies that have revolutionised cancer outcomes.

Professor Killugudi Swaminathan Iyer, The University of Western Australia

Professor Swaminathan Iyer in the School of Molecular Sciences at the University of Western Australia, leads an internationally recognised research program in the field of bionanotechnology. His transdisciplinary research program focuses on integrating fundamental concepts of cell and molecular biology with bioengineering to develop innovative nanoformulations that are designed for the treatment of currently untreatable medical emergencies like traumatic brain injuries, cardiovascular diseases, placental disorders in pregnancy and cancers (breast, cervical, colorectal). The nanoformulations developed by Iyer’s research group are able to track the localisation of the drug and pathological process simultaneously during treatment: a single procedure potentially leads to both diagnosis and therapy in one hit. The ultimate goal of his research is to enable an overall increase in quality and length of life for patients, through informed decisions about timing, dosage, drug choice, and treatment strategies for personalised medicine, with improved efficacy and lower off-target toxicity.

2017

Professor Jian Li, Monash University

Professor Li’s research targets multidrug-resistant bacterial ‘superbugs’. At a time of “Bad Bugs, No Drugs”, his work is of fundamental importance to global health and saves patients’ lives. He is a world-leading expert on last-line antibiotics called polymyxins. His research has generated the majority of modern polymyxin pharmacological data and the first scientifically-based dosing recommendations.

His research has significantly changed clinical practice world-wide and represents scientific excellence in an urgent global medical challenge.

2016

Associate Professor Katherine Kedzierska, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Associate Professor Kedzierska combines cutting-edge basic research with unique clinical studies to define how to generate protective immunity against pandemic and newly emerged influenza viruses. Her research identifies key factors that drive the severe and fatal influenza disease in high-risk groups, including the young, elderly, pregnant women, immunosuppressed individuals and Indigenous Australians. Her findings on the optimal human immunity to influenza viruses have implications for vaccine design and development, and are applicable to other infectious diseases and tumours.

2015

Professor Michael Cowley FTSE, Monash University

Professor Cowley has discovered how the body informs the brain about the amount of body fat we have and how much sugar there is in our blood. Through his understanding of these metabolic pathways in the brain, he has devised new drugs to treat obesity. He has also recently discovered why obesity causes high blood pressure. He has received several awards for his research, and now leads a global effort to find new drugs to treat diabetes.

Professor Stephen Cox, Australian National University

Professor Stephen Cox has conducted research spanning the fields of experimental rock deformation, field-based structural geology, microstructural analysis, isotope geochemistry, seismology and numerical simulation to explore how fluid migration deep in Earth’s crust triggers earthquakes and generates the high permeabilities necessary to sustain the development of many types of ore deposits whose formation involves large fluxes of metal-bearing fluids. His research is providing new understanding of the dynamic coupling between fluid flow, deformation processes, and reaction involved in the formation of ore deposits. It is also providing insight into how the structure of seismically-active fault networks localises fluid migration pathways and ore deposit location at depth in the Earth’s crust. These new perspectives are critical to developing more effective strategies during exploration for Earth resources. Professor Cox has demonstrated a consistent commitment to sharing his knowledge via undergraduate teaching, training research students, and providing training courses for minerals industry geoscientists, both nationally and internationally.

Dr Kathy Ehrig, BHP Billiton

Dr Kathy Ehrig is renowned for her insights into the complex geological events involved in the formation of the supergiant copper-uranium-gold-silver Olympic Dam ore deposit. Her leadership in this research has attracted global attention because her advances may contribute to further discoveries elsewhere. She has created highly innovative solutions in characterising in situ ore properties and predicting metal extraction in advance of mining, primarily in the context of the Olympic Dam mine. These solutions are based on her profound knowledge and understanding of mineral assemblages and have proven to be highly robust and transferable to other mines, thereby having a crucially positive impact on productivity. The foundation of her achievements has been her ability to integrate diverse datasets through harnessing cutting-edge research methods and novel approaches. Dr Ehrig’s diligence, enthusiasm and dedication to the pursuit of science combine to make her an exceptional research leader.

Professor Richard Henley, Australian National University

For over 50 years, Professor Richard Henley has been a leader in the development of understanding of how economic deposits of metals, especially copper and gold, were formed within large-scale hydrothermal systems in volcanoes and mountain belts. The fundamentals that he derived have provided the basis of exploration for epithermal through to orogenic gold deposits, the practical chemistry of fluids in active geothermal systems and many follow-up research programs around the world. He has been acknowledged for his direct contribution to a number of major discoveries including the giant Ladolam Au (Lihir Island, Papua New Guinea) and the Onto Cu-Au (Hu’u, Sumbawa Island, Indonesia) deposits. In the last few years, he has led the recognition of high temperature magmatic gas reactions with rock forming minerals as the principal control on the generation of porphyry copper deposits. He is currently focused on application of X-ray micro CT scanning to derive new and detailed understanding of water-rock interaction chemistry and the properties of rock materials.

Professor Ian Campbell, Australian National University

Professor Ian Campbell is widely recognised internationally as one of the world's leading experts in ore deposit geology. After graduating from the University of Western Australia he spent three years working for Western Mining Corporation at Kambalda where he found the Juan Shoot, one of the richest nickel deposits in Western Australia. He has had a long and distinguished career in mineral exploration and research relating to the origin of magmatic sulfide deposits, particularly platinum group element (PGE) deposits, and later, porphyry copper deposits. His hypothesis for the origin of PGE deposits was initially controversial but recent experiments have confirmed its key predictions. Several of his projects have been directed at discriminating between economically mineralised and barren bodies of rocks; the outcomes of these projects have direct application in exploration.

Professor David Cooke, University of Tasmania

Professor David Cooke’s main research theme is the geological, chemical and fluid processes that produce the world’s major copper-gold deposits, known as ‘porphyry copper deposits’. His recent research has focused on documenting changes in the chemistry of minerals surrounding these magmatic copper-gold deposits. Particular minerals retain trace elements in relative abundances which vary in patterns set by the temperature gradient and wall-rock compositions. Systematic, rapid sampling of a prospective area can define mineral chemical vector techniques that companies can employ to assist targeting of drill holes designed to discover deeply buried deposits. The importance of this work has been recognised by many companies that now employ the techniques as a routine procedure in exploration for magmatic copper–gold deposits. His other significant contribution has been the mentoring of a large number of PhD students who have gone on to fill important geoscience roles in many mineral exploration companies worldwide.

2016

Professor Murray Hitzman, Colorado School of Mines

Professor Hitzman is one of the world’s leading mineral-deposits scientists. He has distinguished himself as a first class researcher, an outstanding educator, a successful mine discoverer and developer, and an influential scientific advisor to government. The foundation of his achievements has been careful field studies of many different types of mineral deposits and insightful interpretations based on an excellent understanding of the physics and chemistry of mineral formation. His outstanding record of success includes the discovery and development of the Lisheen lead-zinc mine in the Republic of Ireland, his leadership role in the recognition and characterisation of a new type of mineral deposit—the iron-oxide copper gold or IOCG type—and his new ideas on the origin of the sediment-hosted copper deposits of Central Africa. His work is having a growing impact globally on 21st century mineral exploration.

2014

Professor Neil Williams PSM, University of Wollongong

Professor Neil Williams' career across academia, the minerals exploration industry and government epitomises a lifelong commitment to the role geoscience can play in our society, but particularly to the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of mineral deposits including hydrocarbons. Professor Williams' leadership of the national geoscience agency from 1995 to 2010 represents an original and sustained contribution to earth sciences and has placed Australia in a global leadership position in the use and application of high quality science to manage natural resource issues.

2012

Dr Shunso Ishihara, Geological Survey of Japan

Shunso Ishihara is famous for his recognition in 1971 of the magnetite- and ilmenite-series of granitic rocks, which he first recognised in Japan and has since applied to many granites elsewhere. He was the first to recognise that the degree of oxidation of a granite magma may be related to geographic location, with important implications for the type of associated mineralisation that may be found. His recognition of "oxidised" and "reduced" granites has been fundamental to developing an understanding of the relationship between the oxygen fugacity of both magmas and the magmatic volatile phase, and mineralisation. The recognition of the association of Sn, W, Mo and Cu mineralisation with granites of different oxidation states by Ishihara predated experimental studies that have demonstrated the dependence of the behaviour of those elements on oxygen fugacity. The magnetite-ilmentite scheme remains the basic scheme for the metallogenic classification of granites to this day.

Professor Anthony Naldrett, The University of the Witwatersrand

Professor Anthony Naldrett was nominated for the Haddon King award because of his major life-time contribution to the understanding of orthomagmatic Ni-Cu-PGE sulfide deposits of all types. Tony Naldretts book on the geology of these deposits (now in second edition) is the primary reference for all who study and explore for this type of deposit. He has played a key role in the elucidation of almost all the fundamental geological processes associated with this type of deposit and his work is the primary reason that this type of deposit is relatively well understood. He has published on all major examples of this deposit type. Notably, he was the first western researcher to obtain access to the giant Noril'sk and Jinchuan deposits in Russia and China.

2010

Professor Emeritus Steven Scott, University of Toronto, Canada

Steven Scott has pioneered the use of deep diving submersibles to observe volcanic massive sulphide ore deposits on the seafloor due to hydrothermal activity. He has been one of the most active scientists in the world in exploring for and facilitating economic mining of deposits on the modern seafloor. One site in the waters of Papua New Guinea may become the first underwater base metal and precious metal mine.

His theoretical work ranges over a very large field of mineral chemistry, the nature and chemistry of fluid inclusions and vent solutions, isotope chemistry and the lithogeochemistry of volcanic massive sulphide environments.

2009

Dr J David Lowell, Lowell Mineral Exploration LLC, Arizona, USA

David Lowell has achieved world-wide fame as a practicing exploration geologist and lecturer. His initial field of speciality was porphyry copper deposits and his ground breaking research and study with Professor John Guilbert in 1967 set the scene for his future discoveries and became a benchmark for the global exploration industry in the search and discovery of these ore deposits. He has an outstanding record spread over nearly 50 years of many discoveries of important copper and gold deposits, including finding the La Escondida porphyry copper deposits.

• 2007—D.I. Groves
• 2005—R.R. Large
• 2003—K.G. McCracken
• 2001—J.P. Hunt
• 1998—R.L. Stanton
• 1995—R.H. Sillitoe
• 1993—F.K. Rickwood; R. Woodall

Professor Andrew Steer, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Professor Andrew Steer is a paediatric infectious diseases physician and Director of the Infection and Immunity Theme at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. He is an international authority on tropical infectious diseases. His research has established global community-based treatment programs for tropical skin infections, influenced vaccine development for Strep A disease, and introduced diagnostic technologies and control programs for rheumatic heart disease. Professor Steer is a global and national leader in these fields, evidenced by scientific leadership roles, including as Co-Chair of the Strep A Global Vaccine Consortium, Co-Director of the Australian Strep A Vaccine Initiative and Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Scabies Control.

Professor Rebecca Guy FAHMS, UNSW Sydney

Professor Rebecca Guy is a renowned international authority in the implementation and evaluation of public health interventions related to HIV and sexually transmissible infections (STIs), particularly among vulnerable populations. Among her many achievements to date, she has introduced STI and COVID-19 point-of-care testing in remote Aboriginal communities and led the evaluation of HIV point-of-care tests that can be conducted by people in their own home (HIV self-tests). Serving as Head of the Surveillance Evaluation and Research Program at The Kirby Institute, as well as leader of both the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in the Accelerated Implementation of New Point-of-Care Technology for Infectious Diseases and the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance, Professor Guy’s research has been highly influential on policy and practice, both in Australia and internationally.

Adjunct Professor Alexandra Martiniuk, University of Sydney

Professor Alexandra Martiniuk is a leader in global research in health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and remote Indigenous communities in Australia and Canada. Alexandra uses her pioneering research to identify and deliver solutions to enable better access to primary health care for disadvantaged populations. She has shed light on inequalities and inefficiencies in models of funding between high-income countries and LMICs, enabling greater transparency and informed decision making to build stronger health systems. Her innovative approach to solving global health problems, and her ability to partner with a wide spectrum of key stakeholders and work with the people on the ground have led to policy change for lay health workers in Malawi, revised referral practices in the Solomon Islands, a new educational approach to HIV prevention in all high schools in Belize, and co-development of a large primary care program for LMICs.

Professor Anushka Patel

Professor Anushka Patel, Chief Scientist at The George Institute for Global Health,is an international leader in our understanding of cardiovascular disease management in global populations. With her focus on low‐ and middle‐income countries, she has not only made ground‐breaking research discoveries that have overturned conventional thinking about cardiovascular disease risk factor management, she has also made a significant impact on disruptive low‐cost strategies to deliver effective care. As one of the few clinician scientists globally working in this area, Professor Patel’s work is inspired by the epidemic of chronic non‐communicable diseases affecting populations around the world, but particularly disadvantaged groups in Asia.

2017

Professor Barend Marais, University of Sydney

Professor Marais’ research has helped to measure and characterise the Tuberculosis (TB) disease burden suffered by children, and to highlight the absence of care in places where it is needed most.   His work has been acknowledged by the WHO and UNICEF, through renewed commitments to find pragmatic solutions to prevent and treat TB in children.  He has also raised awareness that multidrug-resistant (MDR)-TB is actively transmitted within communities, which puts children at risk and requires urgent containment strategies. He wrote the first “survival guide” for paediatricians caring for children with MDR-TB, and contributed to global and regional initiatives to limit its spread.

2016

Professor David Wilson, Burnet Institute

Professor Wilson is recognised internationally for his work in mathematical modelling, impact evaluation, surveillance and public health strategy development by developing innovative approaches to HIV epidemiology, including monitoring and reporting HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections. Professor Wilson has translated his research into high impact, real‐world outcomes, providing the essential evidence base, including cost-effectiveness, to make decisions that affect global health: the epidemiological equivalent of ‘bench-to-bedside’.

2015 inaugural awardee

Professor Nicholas Anstey, Menzies School of Health Research

Professor Anstey has undertaken clinical research on malaria and tuberculosis with partners in the Asia–Pacific. He has identified new ways that the malarial parasite causes severe infections, translating these findings to clinical trials of agents that improve blood supply to vital organs. He has also undertaken clinical trials of drugs to treat all three major species causing malaria in the Asia–Pacific region. He is using his results to contribute to policy change nationally, regionally and globally.