Science In Public
Science writers, communicators, media, training, and public relations
Eureka Prizes nominations, Superstars of STEM applications, the Shaping Australia Awards and many other opportunities now require short videos as part of submissions.
Here are our tips for making videos for award nominations, applications and profiles:
[Read more…] about Tips for making your own profile videoGet ready for the national festival that reaches more than 3 million people via around 2,000 events.
National Science Week is back from 9 to 17 August with stories for every round including entertainment, business, environment, food and wine, Indigenous media, the Arts, health, technology, farming and agriculture, lifestyle, education, and disability media.
Talk to us now for long-lead story ideas, event listings, and great talent across multiple topics. And sign up for our media bulletins to stay in the know and plan your Science Week coverage.
Here are a few early picks:
Space farming, dark matter, Indigenous Knowledge systems, eco-criminology and dinosaur-loving rock bands… the 2025 National Science Week grants reflect the diversity of Australian science, and the myriad of ways it touches all our lives.
Whether participants are looking to build skills, reflect and wonder, debate, or laugh, these events will inspire all Australians to celebrate and engage with science.
Thirty-one grants were awarded by the Australian Government, spanning every state and territory (view all here). Just some of these events include:
The UN has declared 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The Year will be launched on 4 February in Paris.
You’ll hear much more at events throughout the Year and across Australia.
Australian physicists and science communicators are available for interview this week and next:
That’s the message from ovarian cancer researcher Professor Anna deFazio from The Westmead Institute for Medical Research (WIMR) and the University of Sydney.
In January 2024, Homologous Recombination DNA Repair Deficiency (HRD) testing to guide PARP inhibitor treatment became widely available following reimbursement in Australia for patients with advanced stage ovarian cancer with HRD through Medicare.
“This will contribute significantly to the gradual improvement in treatment that has been seen over the last few years. We hope these changes will translate into improved 5-year survival rates, which are currently too low, at less than 50 per cent,” says Prof deFazio. She is leading a project that takes molecular testing further.
Prof deFazio is chief investigator in INOVATe, a project funded by the Cancer Institute NSW and Cancer Council NSW involving 13 Sydney hospitals, 4 research institutes, and 3 Universities, all working to improve ovarian cancer treatment.
“HRD testing has shown how rapidly results can progress from the research laboratory to becoming part of everyday care for patients. Now we can do more,” she says.
“One barrier to improving outcomes was that ovarian cancer had traditionally been treated as a single disease. We now understand that ovarian cancer is a complex, diverse disease comprising multiple distinct subtypes that vary considerably in their biological behaviour and response to standard treatments.”
Over the past eight years, over 800 women in New South Wales with ovarian cancer have agreed to provide samples for comprehensive genomic and molecular testing by the INOVATe Project.
“With Illumina’s support, we were able to better understand every individual cancer, and guide women to the best available clinical trial options,” Prof deFazio says.
A HRD test picks up if ovarian cancer is HRD positive or negative.
“If you are positive then you have a reimbursed treatment option,” says Illumina’s Robert McBride, General Manager Intercontinental Illumina.
“Comprehensive genomic profile gives more information, it can tell you if you are HRD positive and also if your cancer might respond to other drugs. This could be useful for HRD negative patients.”
Prof deFazio says it’s “a remarkable time” to be a cancer researcher.
“I never imagined that we could work on projects where we can make a difference for patients today. There are so many emerging opportunities for treatments.
Professor Anna defazio
“We’ve learnt that every single patient is unique,” she continues.
“The more you look at gene alterations that occur in ovarian cancer cells, the more you realise that every patient and every cancer is different. That’s why wider testing is so important, to get people who need additional treatment on the right trials faster.
“For parts of this research, we used Illumina’s comprehensive genomic profiling technology, which allowed us to test over 500 genes for mutations and look at HRD at the same time. This approach also has great potential for other cancer types including breast cancer and prostate cancer.
“Illumina has been fantastic. We could not have added this important aspect to INOVATe testing without them.”
Caitlin Delaney was diagnosed with stage 4 clear cell ovarian cancer, in 2017, at the age of 39, when her daughters were just two and four years old.
The IVF scientist, from Sydney, says she “probably would have died years ago” if not for a serendipitous encounter with Prof Anna deFazio in 2019.
As luck would have it, Prof deFazio was in the audience when Caitlin spoke at an Ovarian Cancer Australia event at NSW Parliament. Since her diagnosis she has become a patient advocate and founder of compassionate care education business CareFully Solutions.
“A part of why I advocate is not only for the greater good but to stay alive,” Caitlin says. “And through my advocacy, I’ve met amazing people like Anna. She came up to me and asked if I’d had the INOVATe genetic testing that might be able to connect me to some treatments – and I said ‘What’s that?’.”
Caitlin was found to be HRD positive. While she was unable to access a PARP inhibitor, INOVATe testing separately identified another type of gene mutation, in turn guiding treatment specific to her case.
Today, she describes genomic testing as a game-changer and says all women diagnosed with ovarian cancer should immediately ask for the HRD test and “100% request wider genomic profiling”.
“I probably would have died years ago if it wasn’t for genomic testing, and Anna is one of the reasons I’m still here.”
Caitlin also asked for the HER2 tumour marker test, which returned positive, and has undergone a complete genome sequencing through the Australian Rare Cancer Portal. She is a passionate advocate for increased awareness and greater access and equity to genomic profiling and treatments for all cancers.
“Everyone’s cancer is as unique as their fingerprint – even if you have got the same pathology, no two cancers present in the same way. Every cancer patient has such a unique tumour microenvironment. Various mutations and markers may be present, some that we haven’t even identified yet, which is why genomic testing is so important.”
Researchers working with stem cells to study lung diseases and cell-to-cell communication breakdown are the two winners of the 2024 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research, awarded by the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia.
[Read more…] about Growing ‘mini-lungs’ to find treatments to help kids breathe easier; What happens when cells stop talking?
Dr Rhiannon Werder is growing ‘mini-lungs in a dish’ that mimic the complexity and function of lungs in living people.
The Team Leader at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) has already used stem cell-derived lung cells to create models of human genetic diseases, like cystic fibrosis, and acquired lung diseases and infections, such as the common cold.
Now she plans to grow 3 dimensional models of human lung tissue, or ‘mini-lungs’, in a dish to better investigate respiratory infections and drive new treatment discoveries.
In recognition of her leadership in stem cell research, she has received one of two annual $60,000 Metcalf Prizes from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia.
Lung diseases and respiratory infections rank among the top causes of morbidity and mortality in children globally.
“Every time we breathe in, we breathe in potentially horrible things, meaning our lungs are under constant attack – so, it’s no wonder things go wrong,” says Rhiannon matter-of-factly.
“Epithelial cells that line the lungs are our first line of defence, and the first cells that anything we breath in interacts with,” Rhiannon says. “It’s incredible that these cells that line our lungs are so well equipped – attacks are happening almost with every breath, and most of the time you don’t even know about it, because the epithelial cells just deal with it.
“But, of course, underneath those cells are many other cell types, and to better understand respiratory diseases, we need to persuade these other cells to grow in our models of human lung tissues, or ‘mini-lungs’.
“We’ve already had really nice success incorporating immune cells, and what we’re working towards is making mini-lungs in a dish that have full complexity of the lung so that we can study respiratory infections, including how they impact children with chronic lung diseases.
Rhiannon wants her work to lead to treatments that help children breathe easier. Her focus is on how we can teach the lung cells and the immune system to deal with invaders more effectively. This ‘host directed therapy’ contrasts with traditional disease directed therapies that target specific bacteria or viruses, which can then become resistant to treatment.
“We want to find therapeutics to harness the host immune system to treat and/or prevent respiratory viral infections in vulnerable children with chronic lung disease all the way through to anyone who might get a cold every year.”
She’s investigating a range of respiratory infections, from the common cold (rhinovirus) to Group A streptococcus and Mycobacterium abscessus, in tandem with observing how people with genetic lung diseases, like cystic fibrosis and Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, deal with respiratory viruses.
By growing her models of lung tissue using stem cells from health donors and from patients at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, she can start to understand what’s going wrong in both genetic disease and during infections.
“What’s also amazing to me is that when the respiratory system does get overwhelmed, and you have an infection, all the cells come in to help the epithelial cells get rid of whatever it is, and then repair themselves.
“It’s just the most beautiful, coordinated response between local immune cells, recruited immune cells and other structural cells that sit really close to the epithelial cells.
“Each phase of that response is very different and coordinated, and when things don’t go right in that response, that’s when we end up with potentially life-threatening disease.”
Rhiannon says the Metcalf Prize will help her start to address the ‘big question’ of how this diverse range of cells communicate following infection.
For her, the potential power of stem cells is the flexibility to use them at scale, for example in major drug screens, or to genetically manipulate them to find better therapeutics.
“Finding new therapeutics in the lung space has been very slow – and probably a big reason behind this is we’ve been using the wrong model for a really long time.
“Many of the diseases that we’re studying, which affect the lungs, are very human specific diseases, and mice don’t get them.”
Rhiannon received a PhD in Immunology from the University of Queensland, in 2017, uncovering novel antiviral mediators regulating responses to respiratory viral infections. She was then awarded a NHMRC CJ Martin Early Career Fellowship and an Australian Government Endeavour Research Fellowship to undertake post-doctoral work at Boston University’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, her research led to significant findings, including the first discovery of how the lung epithelium responds to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She joined Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in October 2022.
Dr William Roman is growing human muscles on a chip. He’s using them to understand how the skeletal muscle cell, the largest cell in a human body, connects with neurons and tendons to create working muscles.
William is using his ‘mini-muscles’ as a model to understand the fundamental principles of intercellular communication, and hopes this work will enable researchers to better mimic organs outside the body.
He is also studying what happens when communication between neurons and muscle cells breaks down as we age, and in degenerative diseases such as motor neuron disease (MND).
His team’s research at Monash University’s Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI), will lead to stem cell technologies for disease modelling, drug screening, cellular agriculture, and biorobotics.
Next week, William will receive a $60,000 Metcalf Prize from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia in 2024.
William says: “Researchers around the world are mimicking organs, growing mini- kidneys, mini-hearts, even mini-brains. However, a key challenge with these organ-on-chip models is that different cell types do not naturally interact to form the mature connections seen in real organs. We first need a deep understanding of how stem cells communicate in space and time during development.”
Growing up in France, where Duchenne muscular dystrophy was discovered, William watched annual Téléthon fundraising events, which helped shape his quest to understand how muscles work, and ultimately to improve the lives of people living with a range of neuromuscular and general muscle disorders.
He also credits the influence of his grandmother, who taught him “communication is the most important thing in life”.
His focus is on skeletal muscle cells, also known as muscle fibres. They are two to three centimetres long, which makes them easier to work with.
Following his PhD he founded and led MyoChip, a multinational project to build a muscle on a chip. Now he plans to go further and persuade the muscle fibres to connect with tendons forming a complex structure, known as a myotendinous junction, that transmits force from our muscles to our tendons.
“We can already put two cells next to each other in a dish, but it doesn’t seem like they’re interacting the way they should,” William says.
“So, what we’re trying to understand is how good relationships naturally form. And then we want to reproduce that in a dish, providing the right factors or ambience, for two cells to want to interact, at the right time and place in their development process, to form stable, long-term relationships.”
To achieve this, his team is first focused on understanding the cross-talk between cells – aka “good communication” – which contributes to stable relationships in the development of a healthy myotendinous junction.
“This approach will serve as proof of concept to determine if mapping intercellular communication can be used for tissue engineering,” he says.
“And, if we can do that in muscles, it can then be applied to engineer next-generation organ-on-chip systems, using a controlled, bottom-up approach akin to building cars – starting from scratch and piecing together all the different components to recreate organs.”
Then he hopes to teach his ‘muscles’ to connect with neurons to form a neuromuscular junction, in which a neuron forms synaptic connections with a muscle cell. And that would transform research into debilitating muscular and neuromuscular disorders – including MND in which people lose control over skeletal muscles that allow them to move, talk, eat and, ultimately, breathe.
“Modelling a neuromuscular junction will allow us to tackle neuromuscular diseases that are poorly understood and for which there’s no cure,” William says.
“We’re still trying to form a mature neuromuscular junction that better mimics what happens in our bodies. Right now, nobody has been able to do this in a dish.”
MND is a difficult disease to model given 90 per cent of cases are ‘sporadic’, involving random, non-hereditary gene mutations; and 10 per cent ‘familial’, involving inherited, known gene mutations.
Every day in Australia, two people die from MND and another two people are diagnosed with the disease, which has an average life expectancy of two to three years from diagnosis. Yet the disease is still poorly understood, with ongoing debate about the biggest contributor.
“We still don’t really know if it’s just a neuron disease, and the muscle is kind of an unlucky bystander or if the muscle actually plays a role,” William says.
“What we do know is the motor neuron, which controls muscle contraction, detaches from the muscle, causing the neuromuscular junction to become unstable. And, when the neuron no longer touches the muscle, people with MND lose voluntary muscle mobility.
“Little by little, they lose the ability to move and do activities until eating becomes difficult, speaking becomes difficult, and then breathing, which usually leads to death.
“Our hope is to delay or completely prevent the detachment of the neuron from the muscle by improving communication between the cells, enabling people living with MND to keep control over their movements.”
William obtained a Master of Science (Physiology) from Montreal’s McGill University, before completing his PhD in muscle cell biology, split between Paris Descartes University and Berlin’s Freie University, focusing on nuclear positioning during skeletal muscle development. He undertook post-doctoral research on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), in Kyoto; stem cell biology, in Barcelona; and spatial genomics at California’s Stanford University – all while leading the tissue engineering MyoChip team in Lisbon.
William joined the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute in June 2023 as an EMBL Australia Group Leader.
Forty years ago, sawfish were regularly spotted in Australia’s tropical and subtropical waters, as far south as Sydney Harbour. Today, the shark-like rays, easily distinguished by their saw-like snouts which can extend up to two metres (about the length of a Queen-size bed), are rarely seen outside the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory and the Kimberley.
“With sawfish habitats disappearing globally, we’re in a race against time to find out where these magnificent creatures still exist, and in what numbers,” says zoologist and sawfish expert Dr Barbara Wueringer.
The founder and principal scientist of Sharks And Rays Australia (SARA), a nonprofit research organisation headquartered in Cairns, is calling for citizen scientists across Australia’s north to step up during National Sawfish Sighting Week (26 October – 2 November). Register here.
The event is open to participants in Western Australia (from Perth, up the west coast), Northern Territory and Queensland (as far south as Brisbane). Public sightings can also be submitted throughout the year via SARA’s website.
“For four out of five sawfish species, north Australian waters may contain their last populations, and we can’t let them quietly disappear,” Dr Wueringer says. “This is why we want as many people as possible to register and join the search party during National Sawfish Sighting Week.”
Participants who register by Friday 25 October will go in a draw to win “a trip of a lifetime”, joining SARA scientists on a 2025 expedition through Queensland’s wild north, up to Cape York Peninsula.
For most people, with myopia, being short-sighted is an inconvenience. However, for some, myopia can lead to blindness. Ahead of World Sight Day (10 October), researchers at the Lions Eye Institute have some eye-opening advice.
While many parents are forever telling kids to get off their mobile phones, evidence reveals spending time on small screens isn’t the critical issue. Rather, it’s the lack of outdoor time, alongside time spent glued to larger computer screens or reading books.
Research by the team at the Lions Eye Institute also shows people who have had skin cancer are half as likely to have myopia. Their advice is to responsibly balance myopia and skin cancer prevention by aiming to safely increase time outdoors, early or late in the day.
The Perth-based institute is investigating eye growth and genetic factors in children to develop population-based measures for use in standard preschool health checks to predict which children need early intervention to protect their sight.
Lead researcher, Professor David Mackey AO says: “Preschool and primary school children at greatest risk will need interventions, which include increased time outdoors, low-concentration atropine drops, peripheral defocus lenses and possibly other treatments being investigated.”
[Read more…] about Kids should play outside more to reduce the risk of short-sightedness and potential adult blindness