FELLOWS ELECTED IN 2005

Professor Samuel Frank Berkovic FRACP
Professor, Epilepsy Research Centre, Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Austin Health, Heidelberg, Victoria
www.brain.org.au/epilepsyresearch/staff/profiles/s_berkovic.html

Samuel Berkovic is a Professor in the Department of Medicine of the University of Melbourne, and Director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program and the Epilepsy Research Centre at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. He received his medical and neurology training at the University of Melbourne and subsequently held a Fellowship in epilepsy at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University before returning to Australia. He is a clinical neurologist and clinical researcher with a special interest in establishing close research links with basic scientists. His main research interest is the genetics of epilepsy. His group has become the international leader in the genetics of epilepsy, having discovered the first gene for epilepsy in 1995 and subsequently have been involved in the discovery or co-discovery of many of the known epilepsy genes. This has changed the conceptualisation of the causes of epilepsy and is having a major impact on research into epilepsy and on strategies for new treatments.

Professor Michael George Eastwood
Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Adelaide

Michael Eastwood was born in Cumbria and grew up near Manchester in England. He read Mathematics at Hertford College, Oxford and obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1976. Most of the next several years were spent in Oxford working with Roger Penrose and his school. He moved to Adelaide in 1985 where he is currently a Professor and Senior Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Much of his work is concerned with geometry and symmetry.

Dr Jeffrey Graham Ellis
Research Scientist and Program Leader, Genetic Engineering for Plant Improvement, Plant Industry, CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra

Jeff Ellis is a research scientist and leader of CSIRO Plant Industry’s program on Genetic Engineering for Plant Improvement at the Black Mountain Laboratories in Canberra. His research interests are in plant molecular biology and plant pathology, particularly the control of crop diseases using disease resistance genes. His group was the first to isolate plant and fungal genes that determine whether plants resist or succumb to infection of a group of fungal pathogens called rusts and at present he is applying this research to disease control in the Australian wheat crop.

Dr Jorgen Segerlund Frederiksen
Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Victoria
tpsrv.anu.edu.au/people/frederiksen

Jorgen Frederiksen completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Adelaide in mathematical physics and his PhD in theoretical physics in 1972 at the Australian National University and was awarded the Peter William Stroud Prize. Since 1974 he has worked for CSIRO Atmospheric Research where he is currently Chief Research Scientist. He was awarded the CSIRO David Rivett Medal (1984), a Crafoord Fellowship by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1983) and a DSc by the University of Adelaide (1988) for his work in atmospheric dynamics and theoretical physics. He has held positions as visiting scientist in the Netherlands, Sweden and the USA and as program leader and deputy director of the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology. His work has contributed to the fundamental understanding of atmospheric processes determining weather and climate and their predictability, including the structures of storm tracks, blocking, teleconnection patterns, intraseasonal oscillations and equatorial waves, and the statistical dynamics of turbulence.

Professor Franz Grieser
Professor of Chemistry, School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne
www.chemistry.unimelb.edu.au/people/grieser.html and www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/umfs/biogs/UMFS040b.htm

Franz Grieser is a Professor of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne. He is a Deputy Director of the ARC Special Research Centre, Particulate Fluids Processing Centre and the Program Leader of its Liquid-Liquid Systems research activities. He is the Associate Dean (Research and Industry) in the Faculty of Science and is Chair of the Research and Industry Committee. Franz completed his undergraduate (BSc(Hons), 1973) and postgraduate studies (PhD, 1977) at the University of Melbourne. He undertook postdoctoral studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin. He was a QEII Fellow prior to taking up a lectureship at the University of Melbourne in 1984. He maintains an extensive collaborative network with major research groups locally and internationally and has published over 200 research articles. His major research interests cover a wide range of topics in surface and colloid chemistry. In recent years he has developed several research programs examining the use of ultrasound to initiate chemical reactions in aqueous systems.

Professor Ruth Milne Hall
NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow, School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences, University of Sydney

Since January 2005 Ruth Hall has been an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow in the School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences at the University of Sydney. Prior to that she was a Senior Principal Research Fellow in CSIRO Molecular Science. Though the main body of her work on antibiotic resistance and the integron/gene cassette system was performed in CSIRO, she was made redundant in July 2003. Ruth was born and educated in Sydney with a BSc (Hons I in organic chemistry) and MSc in biochemistry from the University of Sydney. She obtained training in microbial genetics while undertaking a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. On returning to Australia, she worked for several years at Monash University then briefly in the John Curtin School of Medicine, Australian National University, and the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland.

Professor Timothy Mark Harrison
Director, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra
shrimp.anu.edu.au/people/tmh/tmh.html

Mark Harrison was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and educated at the University of British Columbia (BSc, 1977) and the Australian National University (PhD, 1981). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he served on the faculty of the State University of New York at Albany until 1989 when he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles where he was Chair from 1997 to 2000. In 2001, he returned to the Australian National University where he is currently Director of the Research School of Earth Sciences. His principal research interests are investigating the origin and evolution of the Tibet-Himalayan mountain system and understanding the conditions under which life emerged on Earth. He was a pioneer in the fields of 40Ar/39Ar thermochronology and secondary ion mass spectrometry and made contributions to understanding the origin and transport of crustal magmas. Mark and his wife Susan have two adult children, Matthew and Ainslie.

Professor Richard Ian Hartley
Professor, Department of Information Engineering, Research School of Information Science and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra
users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~hartley/

Richard Hartley leads the computer vision group in the Department of Information Engineering at the Australian National University, where he has been since 2001. He is also leader of the Automated Systems and Sensor Technology Program in National ICT Australia. He received a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Toronto for his research in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. He worked for General Electric in New York State from 1985 to 2001, during which time he was involved with automatic VLSI and electronic design and created a very successful design system called the Parsifal Silicon Compiler. He began work in Imaging with GE’s flight-simulation division, constructing image mosaics from aerial and satellite imagery. This led to an extended research effort in applying projective geometry techniques to computer vision. He was among the first to emphasise the importance of these techniques in scene analysis from multiple views. He has authored papers in photogrammetry, computer vision, geometric topology, geometric voting theory, computational geometry and computer-aided design, and holds 32 US patents.

Dr Robin Holliday FRS
West Pennant Hills, New South Wales

Robin Holliday's first degree was at Cambridge University, and this was followed by a PhD (1959). He worked at the John Innes Institute from 1958-1965, with a year in the Department of Genetics, University of Washington, Seattle (1962-1963). In 1965 he moved to the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, and worked in the Microbiology Division. He became head of a new Division of Genetics in 1970, and continued research there until 1988. In 1976 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He took up the position of Chief Research Scientist with CSIRO at its North Ryde laboratories in 1988. His research was with a much smaller group than in London, and it concentrated on epigenetics and cellular ageing. Robin retired from CSIRO in 1997.

Professor Stephen Timothy Hyde
Professor of Physics, Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra
wwwrsphysse.anu.edu.au/~sth110/sth.html

Stephen Hyde was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia (1978-1980) before completing his BSc (Hons, Physics) degree at Monash University (1981). He then worked as a research assistant at Lund University, where he was switched on to scientific research by Sten Andersson. He returned to Australia and completed a PhD at Monash University (1986) based on his Lund work (with the firm support of Alex McLaren). On completion he was offered a position at the Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, where he has remained since, working on shape and form. He was awarded the Australian Academy of Science’s Pawsey Medal in 1993. After four years as Acting Head, he succeeded Barry Ninham as Head of Applied Maths in 2000, stepping down in 2002 to get on with research. He was awarded an ARC Federation Fellowship in 2004.

Professor Chennupati Jagadish
Federation Fellow and Professor, Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra
wwwrsphysse.anu.edu.au/eme/profile.php/7

Chennupati Jagadish was born and educated in India and worked in India and Canada prior to moving to Australia in 1990. He is currently a Federation Fellow, Professor and Head of Semiconductor Optoelectronics and Nanotechnology Group in the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University. His research interests include quantum dots, quantum wires, quantum dot lasers, quantum dot photodetectors, quantum dot photonic integrated circuits and photonic crystals. He won the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc (IEEE) Millennium Medal and received Distinguished Lecturer awards from both IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society and IEEE Electron Devices Society. He has published more than 450 research papers (290 journal papers), five US patents filed, co-authored a book and edited five conference proceedings. He is a Fellow of ATSE, IEEE, APS, OSA, IoP, AIP, and IoN. He is serving as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology.

Professor Trevor David Lamb FRS
ARC Federation Fellow, Division of Neuroscience, John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra
http://jcsmr.anu.edu.au/org/dns/visual/index.php

Trevor Lamb trained as an electrical engineer in Melbourne, before undertaking a PhD in neuroscience in Cambridge, where he remained for 30 years. He jointly developed the ‘suction pipette’ method for recording electrical responses of individual rod and cone photoreceptors in the retina, and discovered that rods can respond reliably to individual photons of light. In collaboration with Ed Pugh in Philadelphia, he developed a mathematical description of the cascade of biochemical and biophysical events that underlie activation of the photoreceptor’s response to light, and most recently he provided a description for the slowness of human ‘dark adaptation’ following exposure of the eye to intense illumination. His current research uses the electroretinogram (ERG) to probe the neural activity of cells in the living human eye. He returned to Australia in 2003, upon the award of an ARC Federation Fellowship at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University.

Professor Geoffrey Ian McFadden
Professor, School of Botany, University of Melbourne
homepage.mac.com/fad1/McFaddenLab.html

Geoff McFadden took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Melbourne. After early research work on Antarctic sea ice algae, he shifted emphasis to algal cell biology completing a PhD in the Botany School, University of Melbourne in 1984. He then took up a postdoctoral position in Muenster, Germany for three years. Geoff was awarded a QEII Fellowship in 1987 and joined Professor Adrienne Clarke at the Plant Cell Biology Research Centre, University of Melbourne to work on plant molecular biology. He subsequently received an ARC Senior Research Fellowship to investigate chloroplast origins, which continues to be his main research theme. In 1995 Geoff took up a post at the Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Canada. Geoff is now an Australian Research Council Professor in the School of Botany, University of Melbourne and his current theme is tropical diseases. He has published 130 papers, many in high profile journals and collaborates with a wide range of international scientists. Geoff lives near Bells Beach and surfs as much as he can.

Professor Amnon Neeman
Professor, Centre for Mathematics and its Applications, Australian National University, Canberra
wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/~neeman/

Amnon Neeman received his BSc and MSc from the University of Sydney in 1979 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1983. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advances Studies (Princeton) in 1983-84, then taught at Princeton University 1984-87, the University of Virginia 1987-1998, and has been at the Australian National University since early 1999. He has worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic K-theory, homological algebra and topology.

Professor Hugh Philip Possingham
Professor and Director, The Ecology Centre, University of Queensland, Brisbane
www.ecology.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=20910&pid=

Hugh Possingham completed Applied Mathematics Honours at the University of Adelaide in 1984 and a doctorate at Oxford University in 1987 (Rhodes scholarship). Postdoctoral research followed at Stanford University and the Australian National University (QEII Fellow). In 1991 he took a Lectureship in the Department of Applied Mathematics, and by 1995 was Professor and Foundation Chair of the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Adelaide. In July 2000 he became Professor of Mathematics and Ecology at the University of Queensland where he is currently an ARC Professorial Research Fellow and Director of The Ecology Centre. Hugh plays public roles as chair of the Federal government’s Biological Diversity Advisory Committee and member of The Wentworth Group. He has been awarded the POL Eureka Prize for Environmental Research (1999), the Australian Academy of Science’s inaugural Fenner Medal (2000) and the Australian Mathematical Society Medal (2001). He suffers the affliction of obsessive bird watching.

Professor John Ralston
Director and Professor of Physical Chemistry and Minerals Processing, Ian Wark Research Institute, University of South Australia
www.unisa.edu.au/iwri/staffpages/johnralston.asp and www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/Homepage.asp?Name=John.Ralston

John Ralston is Director of the Ian Wark Research Institute at the University of South Australia, and Professor of Physical Chemistry and Minerals Processing. His scientific contributions cover specialty areas of physical chemistry, colloid and surface chemistry including mineral flotation processes, surface chemistry of metal sulphides and the static and dynamic wetting behaviour of solid surfaces. He provided the inspiration and motivating force for the establishment of the Ian Wark Research Institute, which is now known worldwide for its fundamental research in interfaces. Outside science, he has a strong interest in literature, world history, travelling and sport, especially skiing.