2026 Archives

Dr Owen Missen

Globally, society needs increasing volumes of metals to meet the sustainable development needs of the growing population. The challenges associated with mining metals include impacts to landscapes and local air and water quality. Modern day mining produces a wider array of metal and metalloid products than ever before, providing the critical raw materials for everything from electric vehicle batteries to smartphone components to the wiring needed to connect our increasingly electric world. One key problem is the management of mine wastes and by-products containing less common critical elements, such as cobalt (used in batteries) and tellurium (used in some solar panels). There is limited knowledge of the mobility of these elements once (inadvertently) released to the wider environment, leading to questions such as: how do they move through waterways? What microbes are involved? What secondary minerals do they form? Reframing these questions into a potential solution for a major challenge: Can we use natural processes to devise innovative ways to produce these elements more economically from material that would otherwise be categorised as by-products or waste?

Dr Missen’s research primarily focuses on understanding the behaviour of critical elements at the Earth’s surface, particularly tellurium and cobalt, which are used in renewable energy technologies. His work involves sample collection at sites that contain either naturally or anthropogenically elevated concentrations of critical elements. Subsequently, samples are analysed via detailed analytical work, using micro- and even nano-scale techniques such as electron microscopy and Synchrotron X-ray techniques. These results are integrated with field and bulk sample observations to create holistic frameworks for environmental cycling of critical elements. Processes that naturally concentrate these elements are further researched as potential pathways for enriching them. In addition to his focus on environmental geology, Dr Missen conducts research across the mining value chain, from investigating how critical mineral deposits form to improving the processes used to separate and recover valuable minerals. Dr Missen’s work is thus helping improve understanding of the critical minerals needed for the transition to cleaner energy while supporting more sustainable approaches to resource development.

Dr Brooklyn Fraser

Dr Brooklyn Fraser is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania, whose research explores how childhood physical fitness shapes cardiovascular health across the lifespan. Although aerobic and muscular fitness are recognised indicators of cardiovascular health, childhood fitness is rarely assessed or incorporated into disease prevention strategies. Consequently, opportunities to identify individuals at increased risk of future cardiovascular disease and intervene early may be missed. Using data from a unique Australian cohort study that has followed participants from childhood into adulthood, Dr Fraser investigates whether fitness in childhood influences cardiovascular health later in life. Her work seeks to address an important evidence gap and determine whether childhood fitness could serve as an effective target for earlier prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Dr Fraser’s research has demonstrated that childhood fitness independently predicts adult cardiometabolic health and improves the prediction of future cardiovascular risk beyond traditional risk factors. Collectively, her work has advanced a life-course perspective on cardiovascular disease prevention by showing that fitness tracks from childhood into adulthood, identifying stable fitness trajectories, and providing evidence that childhood is a critical period for prevention. She has also identified declining fitness levels among Australian children and drawn attention to the lack of routine fitness surveillance. In addition, she has worked with international experts to develop practical tools for assessing children’s fitness and define key research priorities in childhood fitness, helping shape the global research agenda in this emerging field. Her work aims to generate the evidence needed to establish childhood fitness as an actionable target for early cardiovascular disease prevention. This evidence could help inform public health policy, clinical practice, and school-based health initiatives that support lifelong cardiovascular health, helping create stronger starts and healthier hearts for future generations.

A/Prof Rutger de Zoete

Chronic neck and back pain are massive, invisible burdens in Australia, costing the healthcare system over $10 billion every year and causing substantial personal suffering. For decades, patients have been told to focus primarily on the joint or muscle, yet this traditional “one-size-fits-all” approach has contributed to a frustrating cycle of clinical trial-and-error, where many patients endure ineffective interventions, prolonged recovery times, and ongoing disability. A key challenge in contemporary musculoskeletal health is understanding why identical physical treatments succeed for some individuals but fail for others, and how care can be tailored more precisely to the individual from the outset. By investigating the brain’s role in musculoskeletal pain, Associate Professor de Zoete’s vision is to help make treatment more targeted, personalised, and effective.

Associate Professor Rutger de Zoete addresses the global disability burden of musculoskeletal pain by exploring how the central nervous system contributes to persistent symptoms. His research uses advanced structural and functional MRI to investigate unique brain signatures that may ultimately help predict whether a specific intervention will benefit an individual before therapy even begins. His work provides early evidence that chronic neck pain is associated with neuroplastic changes in the central nervous system, identifying features such as the volume and connectivity of the insular cortex as potential markers of treatment response. By exploring these neural signatures, Associate Professor de Zoete is working to characterise distinct treatment-response phenotypes, while investigating how targeted exercise might positively influence these brain characteristics. This research represents an important step toward person-centred precision medicine. For people living with chronic pain, moving from empirical trial-and-error pathways toward tailored exercise therapy holds the potential to support faster recovery, reduce ineffective interventions, and optimise healthcare resources.

Dr Derek Tran

Eight babies are born with congenital heart disease in Australia every day. While advances in medical care mean most now survive into adulthood, many experience lifelong fatigue, breathlessness, reduced exercise capacity, and cardiovascular complications.

Reduced exercise capacity is more than a limitation on everyday activities. In people with congenital heart disease, it is associated with poorer health outcomes, including a greater risk of hospitalisation. Yet people with congenital heart disease have historically been advised to restrict physical activity because of concerns about safety, creating uncertainty about how much exercise is safe, how hard people should exercise, and how exercise should be prescribed.

Dr Derek Tran’s research aims to address this by understanding why exercise capacity is reduced and determining how exercise can be used safely and effectively to help people with congenital heart disease live longer, healthier, and more active lives.

Dr Tran is a Heart Foundation Fellow and clinical exercise physiologist whose research combines exercise physiology, cardiopulmonary exercise testing, and clinical trials to identify what limits exercise capacity and determine the safest and most effective type, intensity, and amount of exercise for people with congenital heart disease.

His work has contributed to national exercise recommendations and international clinical guidelines, helping shift clinical practice away from unnecessary exercise restriction towards safe, evidence-based exercise prescription.

More recently, his research has focused on translating this evidence into routine healthcare through personalised exercise testing and care pathways, including the establishment of the Cardiopulmonary Exercise and Lifestyle (CEL) Clinic. The broader goal is to make exercise a standard part of congenital heart disease care and improve exercise capacity, cardiovascular health, and quality of life.

Dr Hammond Pearce

Dr Hammond Pearce studies how artificial intelligence is changing the security and trustworthiness of the digital systems we increasingly depend on. AI can help us write software, design computer hardware and communicate at unprecedented scale, but it can also introduce security vulnerabilities, accelerate misinformation and make it harder to know what information and technology we can trust. His work asks how society can gain the benefits of AI while reducing these emerging risks.

Dr Pearce develops and tests ways to make AI-enabled technology safer and more trustworthy. His research has shown that AI-generated software can contain serious security flaws, and he now investigates how AI can instead be used to find and repair vulnerabilities in both software and computer hardware, including helping pioneer the use of AI for high-level computer-chip design. He also develops practical education tools, including Capture the Narrative, which teaches students how AI can manipulate social media, and the Hackster, a low-cost platform for learning hardware security.

Dr Laura Driessen

Stars have a big impact on the planets they orbit. Dr Laura Driessen is a radio astronomer at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney, who investigates stars to find out if they have the right conditions for life. Laura uses radio telescopes in Australia, like the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope and Australian Telescope Compact Array, to identify and study magnetic stars.

Using ASKAP, she has already doubled the known number of radio stars, and is now using them to understand more about what makes a star a radio star. She has published a radio star catalogue, a significant undertaking with a large impact, making radio observations of stars accessible to the wider astronomy community.

Laura is a passionate science communicator, communicating not just her research, but astronomy and Australian scientific research in general. She regularly works on the ABC Radio Science Q&A shows answering science questions from the public, and has communicated her science on Channel 10 and The Conversation. She also communicates science to rural and remote communities, such as through the DeadlyScience STEM legends program.

Dr Sima Mousavi

Australia is often considered geologically quiet but earthquakes occur here regularly, and many of the faults responsible are hidden underground and unmapped. The 2021 Woods Point earthquake in Victoria is a perfect example; the fault was 130 kilometres from Melbourne CBD, yet the damage was felt across the city. Dr Sima Mousavi studies these hidden earthquake sources, working to understand where they are, how they rupture, and what risks they pose to Australian communities and infrastructure.

But Dr Mousavi believes that understanding the Earth is only half the job. As the lead of the Australian Seismometers in Schools (AuSIS) program, she places real research-grade seismometers in schools across the country, connecting students directly with live earthquake data. From suburban classrooms to remote and First Nations communities that mainstream science rarely reaches, she brings real earthquake science to students who might never otherwise encounter a working scientist.

This outreach mission is urgent because Australia faces a critical shortage of Earth scientists at exactly the moment demand is rising. Geoscientists are needed for the energy transition, critical minerals discovery, natural hazard assessment, and groundwater management. Dr Mousavi’s work addresses both sides of this challenge: advancing our scientific understanding of earthquake hazard, and inspiring the next generation of Australians to become the Earth scientists our country urgently needs.

Dr Mousavi’s research focuses on characterising earthquakes and the faults that produce them across Australia. She led the first comprehensive source characterisation of the 2021 Mw 5.9 Woods Point earthquake in Victoria, identifying the previously unknown fault responsible and showing that hidden structures can pose real seismic hazard in regions long considered safe. She is currently extending this work to the 2019 Mw 6.6 Broome offshore earthquake and the 2025 Brisbane sequence, building a clearer picture of earthquake risk across the continent. She has also contributed to a new high-resolution seismic catalogue for southwestern Australia, improving detection of smaller earthquakes where historical records are sparse.

To address Australia’s growing geoscience workforce crisis, Dr Mousavi leads the Australian Seismometers in Schools (AuSIS) program, connecting students across the country with real earthquake data from research-grade instruments in their own classrooms. Since 2019 she has delivered over 250 workshops and teacher professional development sessions nationwide, with deliberate focus on regional, remote, and First Nations communities. She has secured dedicated funding to embed seismometers within Aboriginal communities across APY Lands, Horn Island, Oak Valley, Yalata, Yulara, and Nhulunbuy, building genuine, long-term partnerships with Country.

Dr Brianna Le Busque

Dr. Brianna Le Busque is trying to make Australia a more Ocean Literate Society. Many Australians are not connected to the ocean which means they are not getting the benefits of blue spaces or caring for our oceans.

Brianna Le Busque explores peoples’ relationship with the ocean and marine species, including how biophobia (dislike/fear of the natural world) and biophilia (positive connections to the natural world) impact how people engage with the ocean and ocean conservation. Some projects she has worked on recently include understanding children’s fear of sharks, evaluating benefits of ocean retreat experiences, and exploring eco-anxiety caused by the Harmful Algal Bloom event in South Australia. She brings a psychological lens to marine science, and likes to say she studies the most complicated species- people!

A/Prof Phillipa McCormack

Australia is one of the most biodiverse countries on earth with unique environments that exist nowhere else in the world. However, serious threats such as climate disasters, invasive species and land clearing mean that many of Australia’s environments are at risk of being lost. National and state governments have recognised that we need stronger, clearer and more future-focused laws and policies to address these threats.

Phillipa works at this crucial intersection between conservation science and practical legal reform, helping to design laws and policies that can keep environments safe, now and into the future.

Phillipa’s research focuses on translating biodiversity science into ambitious legal reform to help protect nature. Collaborating with government, scientists and the community, she examines how cutting-edge conservation research can inform new ways of writing, and putting into practice, future-focused nature laws. In particular, her research focuses on embedding climate adaptation strategies into laws and policies such as the new Biodiversity Act 2025 in South Australia.

Phillipa is also passionate about equipping the next generation of scientists to understand how laws – when they are working well – can help nature and people to flourish. In her activities with schools, she works to help students to advocate for better climate education and to help shape the next generation of climate and nature warriors.

A/Prof Stephanie Harrison

Ensuring that older people receive high-quality care is a critical societal challenge that affects individuals, families, and communities across Australia. As the population ages and increasing numbers of older adults access aged care services, there is a growing need to ensure that care is informed by high-quality evidence. However, older people accessing aged care are frequently underrepresented in many research studies, limiting the evidence available to guide their treatment and care.

A/Prof Harrison uses large, linked national datasets to better understand the health of older people and the care they receive. By examining information that is already collected through health and aged care systems, she identifies ways to improve care, safety, and health outcomes for older people. Her research provides important evidence that helps policy makers and aged care providers make decisions to improve services for older people.

Her work has led to real-world improvements in aged care policy and practice. For example, her research on the use of psychotropic medicines helped shape national policy, improving the safety and quality of care for more than 400,000 people living with dementia. She has also contributed to the expansion of the Australian Government’s National Aged Care Quality Indicator Program, which helps monitor and improve the quality and safety of aged care.

A/Prof Harrison is currently leading research to improve access to long-term care for older people after stroke and to understand how recent aged care reforms are affecting people living with dementia. She is also leading a large program of research examining how factors such as where people live, their income, social support, and cultural background influence access to aged care services. This work aims to reduce inequalities and ensure that all older people can access the care and support they need, when they need it.