News from ANU
In this section:
National Europe Centre receives funding
Cosmic stocktake illuminates big bang
Events spread passion for science
Impressive growth for ANU E Press
New Clinical School opens for medical students
New facility takes major step in cancer fight
Eureka Prize for secure information breakthrough
ANU ranks first among Australian universities
National teaching awards winners announced
National Europe Centre receives funding
The National Europe Centre (NEC) at ANU will continue to foster scholarly dialogue and research between Europe and Australia with a $1 million-plus funding boost from the European Union.
The European Commission recently announced that it would co-finance the NEC for another three and a half years.
NEC Director Professor Simon Bronitt says the new funding arrangement will lead to a change in focus for the centre, encouraging more comparative research and collaboration between scholars in Australia and Europe.
“We’ll be fostering more comparative and interdisciplinary activities across a range of fields, including economics, environmental studies and law,” Professor Bronitt says.
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Cosmic stocktake illuminates big bang
The universe has used up 20 per cent of its normal matter, or original fuel reserves, according to the findings of a survey of the nearby universe.
The survey, conducted by an international team of astronomers involving ANU researchers, revealed that about 20 per cent of the normal matter or fuel produced by the Big Bang 14 billion years ago is now in stars. A further 0.1 per cent of the matter lies in dust expelled from massive stars (and from which solid structures like the Earth and humans are made) and about 0.01 per cent is in super-massive black holes.
Dr Alister Graham, an astronomer at ANU who worked on the survey, says that the researchers determined how much matter is in the stars through a ‘cosmic stocktake’.
“We needed to measure the stellar mass within a representative volume of the local universe. This required accurate and complete distance information for all the galaxies of stars that we imaged. This is where the Australian telescopes played a key role,” Dr Graham says.
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Events spread passion for science
More than 700 people took part in the National Science Week activities hosted by ANU this year.
The ANU College of Science coordinated lectures, demonstrations and displays in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
Talks on the intersection of art and science, astronomy, brain function, and undersea volcanoes were well attended, as were activities like the public viewing nights at Mount Stromlo.
Professor Denis Evans, Convener of the College, says such outreach events have implications for the future of science.
“In recent times, more and more young people in the Western world have turned away from careers in science. By demonstrating that science is important and can be exciting, we’re helping to turn that trend around.”
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Impressive growth for ANU E Press
Increasing numbers of departments and academics are switching on to the idea of electronic publishing at ANU, attracted by the possibilities of a global audience for their work.
More than 300,000 published titles have already been downloaded from ANU E Press this year, including works that had fallen out of print but are now proving popular in ‘Print on Demand’ (PoD) format.
“We exist to get scholarship out there to people,” Electronic Publishing Coordinator Lorena Kanellopoulos says. “If you want to download and print a copy of one of our books for free, you can. To print it at home or at work will cost you about the same amount as it would to order one of our professionally produced PoD books. It won’t look as good, but it’s an option. We’re about making sure that scholarship is accessible to a global readership.”
In addition to original scholarly works and biographies, ANU E Press publishes theses, books adapted from theses, and reprints of out-of-print titles. Works are available in a free electronic format and can also be ordered in hardcopy via PoD for a fee.
“E Press is the only academic e-publisher in Australia that provides such variety,” Mrs Kanellopoulos says. “There are others around, but they tend to focus on journals, and don’t provide publications for free.”
The quality of E Press titles is maintained through a rigorous internal and external peer review process. This stringent quality control was a contributing factor in the press becoming the first electronic publisher in Australia to be recognised by the Department of Education, Science and Training for academics to earn points under the Higher Education Research Data Collection scheme.
This year E Press has already published 14 titles, and plans to produce another 15 before 2007.
For more information about ANU E Press visit http://epress.anu.edu.au/
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New Clinical School opens for medical students
Just over three years since opening its doors to its first 80 students on campus, the ANU Medical School has reached another milestone with the opening of the new facilities for the Canberra Clinical School at the Canberra Hospital.
The building was officially opened on 1 August, the 60th anniversary of ANU. ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope unveiled a plaque to mark the occasion.
Also welcoming the opening of the school were Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb, ACT Health Acting CEO Mark Cormack and ANU Medical School Dean Professor Paul Gatenby.
“This building, which is essentially the nexus between the ANU Medical School and the Canberra Hospital, was always going to be an integral part of the Medical School’s ongoing success. It will foster inquiry, inspiration and achievement from the staff and students to be based here,” Professor Chubb says.
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New facility takes major step in cancer fight
A new state-of-the-art biomolecular resource facility recently opened at ANU will cement the role that The John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) plays in the fight against cancer.
The Australian Cancer Research Foundation Biomolecular Resource Facility features $1.7 million worth of equipment purchased thanks to a $1.13 million grant from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) and funding from ANU.
“The facility provides much of the fundamental infrastructure for investigations of the molecular aspects of cancer biology,” Professor Judith Whitworth, Convener of the ANU College of Medicine and Health Sciences and JCSMR Director, says.
“Each piece of equipment we purchased with the grant and funding from the University will support multiple cancer research projects and presents an extremely powerful analytical research engine.”
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Eureka Prize for secure information breakthrough
One of Australia’s top science prizes has been awarded to researchers based at ANU who have developed a fast and totally secure way to transmit information using laser beams.
The $10,000 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research was given to the team based at the ANU Department of Physics for its quantum cryptography breakthrough, which uses light to convey data that is impervious to hackers and eavesdroppers.
The technology, developed at ANU in collaboration with theorists from the University of Queensland, enables two parties, a sender and a receiver, to generate a secret electronic ‘key’. This key can be used by the sender to encrypt a message that only a receiver with the matching key can decrypt.
“Where traditional cryptography is based on complex mathematics, we instead use the laws of physics to guarantee communication security,” explains team leader Dr Ping Koy Lam, who also won a Eureka Prize in 2003 for his outreach activities on teleportation research.
The ability to guarantee information security would be of great benefit to government and the corporate sector. The researchers are currently collaborating with the Department of Defence, as well as working towards the commercialisation of their technology for other clients.
“Although several groups around the world have quantum cryptographic technology, our group was one of the first to demonstrate the transmission of a completely secret key via bright laser beams and common optics,” Dr Thomas Symul says.
“We recognise that there may be challenges along the way, but we’ve demonstrated that the technology works from end to end, and are confident of developing a viable commercial form. The Eureka Prize is a further validation of our efforts,” says Vikram Sharma, researcher and CEO-elect of QuintessenceLabs, the commercial spin-off of this research.
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ANU ranks first among Australian universities
ANU has been named the top university in Australia in three new international tertiary education rankings.
The University was ranked first in Australia and sixteenth in the world in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University Rankings for 2006. It was the only Australian university listed in the top 20.
In the first Top 100 Global Universities list compiled by Newsweek International, ANU was placed 38th. Its nearest contemporary in Australia was the University of Sydney at 50th, followed by the University of Melbourne at 53rd.
The editors of the Newsweek list drew on measures used by THES and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in their ranking of the world’s universities.
Half of each university’s score was based on research citations and publication counts. The rest of the score was based on numbers of international staff and students, citations per faculty member, staff-student ratios, and library holdings.
ANU also scored highly in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities for 2006. The University was placed 54th overall, up two positions on last year, and held its place as the top institution in the southern hemisphere. It was ranked third among universities in the Asia-Pacific region. IARU partner the University of Tokyo ranked first, and Kyoto University ranked second.
The majority of the Shanghai Jiao Tong rank is based on academic awards and research output.
Newsweek ranking:
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/site/newsweek/
Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm
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National teaching awards winners announced
The federal national teaching institute recently honoured eight ANU staff members for sustained and original contributions to the learning experiences of students.
Recipients of the Carrick Institute’s Citations for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning each receive $10,000.
They were nominated by their peers and received strong endorsement from their divisions.
ANU recipients of the 2006 Carrick Citations:
• Dr Paul Chen, School of Economics
• Dr John Close, Department of Physics
• Dr Christopher Forth, School of Social Sciences
• Dr Paul Francis, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Professor Rosemary Martin, ANU Medical School
• Mr John Reid, School of Art
• Dr Barbara Van Leeuwen, School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• Ms Susan West, School of Music.
The Carrick Institute also administers awards for teaching excellence, program excellence, and the Prime Minister’s award for university teacher of the year.
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