Alumni Profiles

Robert Shellie Distinguished Chair

“Chemical measurement usually involves taking samples to a laboratory where an analyst makes measurements using specialized scientific instrumentation. However, a preferred tactic in many circumstances may be to employ miniaturized instrumentation, permitting the analyst to ‘bring the laboratory to the sample’.”

Associate Professor Robert Shellie, ARC Australian Research Fellow, with the University of Tasmania (UTAS) is this year’s winner of the Fulbright Tasmania Scholarship sponsored by the Tasmanian State Government and UTAS. Robert will go to Purdue University for three months to further his work in the development of an in-situ system for chemical measurement of environmental pollutants in remote locations. This could be used in locations such as Antarctica, the sub-Antarctic, and by extension industrial sites, and remote communities.

Robert has led research into developing instrumentation for environmental monitoring of fuel spills in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic, and this is what sparked his interest in the development of this technology.

“Having performed work in the AAD laboratory at Macquarie Island as part of Australia’s 2007-2008 Antarctic Program, I became acutely aware of the need to develop readily transportable instrumentation for performing chemical analysis in remote locations,” Robert said.

“I have since developed a significant interest in miniaturized instrumentation and my research group is currently developing and testing field-transportable instrumentation. In the future I aim to intensify development of miniaturized instrumentation for chemical analysis of complex mixtures in my research group.”

Robert has a BAppSc and a PhD in chemistry from RMIT University. He has won awards and prizes including a Australian Research Council Australian Research Fellowship; a Royal Australian Chemical Institute Robert Cattrall Medal;  Australian Institute of Policy and Science Tasmanian Young Tall Poppy of the Year; and a University of Tasmania Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence. He has also published extensively. His interests include music, art, and renovating.

The prestigious Fulbright program is the largest educational scholarship of its kind, created by U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright and the U.S. Government in 1946. Aimed at promoting mutual understanding through educational exchange, it operates between the U.S. and 155 countries. In Australia, the scholarships are funded by the Australian and U.S. Governments and corporate partners and administered by the Australian-American Fulbright Commission in Canberra.

Professor Karen Barad Senior Scholars

Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory.

Timothy Bralower Senior Scholars

“Ecosystems are being altered by climate change—coral reefs are dying, food chains are being damaged, and marine diversity is dropping. A combination of scientific research and policy decisions are desperately needed to address the changes. It is an effort for which international collaboration is essential.”

Professor Timothy Bralower, Professor and Head of the Department of Geosciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Pennsylvania State University has received a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to come to the Climate Research Centre at the University of New South Wales for six months. He will focus on ocean acidification and climate change.

Timothy will set up a joint U.S.-Australian project that will address acidification and the larger issue of climate change on three levels.

Firstly the collaboration will work on improving our scientific understanding of ocean acidification. Secondly he will work with Australian geoscience departments to strengthen programs focused on climate change, and thirdly, he will play a role in educating the broader public on pressing environmental issues by developing an on-line course, “Earth Futures.”

“As humans add increasing amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, temperatures are rising and global climate is changing. The oceans are becoming more acidic, causing important marine organisms such as reef-forming corals to dissolve,” Professor Bralower said.

“Current projections suggest that the oceans will become sufficiently acidic to extinguish coral reefs within this century. Acidification will also threaten some of the most important plankton at the bottom of the food chain, and loss of these organisms could hurt life throughout the oceans.”

Timothy has a BA with Honours in Geology, Oxford University, England; an MS in Oceanography, and PhD in Earth Sciences from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is a recognised leader in the field of paleoceanography, has published extensively, and is a dedicated educator and administrator. In his spare time he enjoys gardening, travel, and a variety of sports.

Dr Menna Jones Senior Scholars

Menna is an ecologist specialising in wildlife conservation and ecosystem restoration in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Tasmania. She leads research on native marsupial carnivores, Tasmanian devils and quolls, how their ecological interactions might protect wildlife from feral cats, and how the Tasmanian devil is evolving to save itself from a devastating novel transmissible cancer.

Menna’s Fulbright project, Harnessing Native Predators to Conserve Wildlife at Landscape-Scale, is a major opportunity to expand the scope of ecological science for tackling Australia’s biodiversity crisis. She will work with Professor Bill Ripple at Oregon State University to understand how ecological history influences the impacts on biodiversity of invasive predators, and to test the efficacy of native predators for invasive predator control. The project will contribute to understanding the natural ecological processes that can be harnessed to restore native species and functional ecosystems on large scales in unconfined landscapes.

Mari Ostendorf Senior Scholars

“As storage capacity and communication bandwidth increase, there is a rapid growth of spoken material available online, including videos as well as news broadcasts.”

Professor and Associate Dean of the Engineering Department at the University of Washington – Seattle, Mari Ostendorf, has won a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to spend eight months at Macquarie University working on language processing for electronic applications.

“Since automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has improved substantially over the past decade, it is now possible to use ASR to transcribe and more easily access these ‘spoken documents,’” Mari said.

“With this growth comes a need for information management, applying language technology such as summarization, translation and information extraction to spoken documents as we do for text.”

“It is well known that human listeners leverage what we call prosodic cues to disambiguate spoken language. These include timing, pitch and energy modulation related to emphasis and segmentation. Prosodic cues are also known to be critically important to the quality of automatic speech synthesis systems and have long been part of such systems.”

Researchers still lack a good model of variation in prosodic features, where variation is due to both phonetic and phonological contexts as well as speaker, register and affect or emotion differences.

Mari’s research will build on an existing collaboration between herself and her host, Professor Mark Johnson. The project will address two technical challenges in integrating prosody and parsing: linking the continuously varying prosodic cues with symbolic syntactic cues via posteriors of symbolic prosodic events, and developing adaptive models that account for prosody/syntax variation as a function of register and fluency of speech.

Mari has a BS, MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She has won various awards and prizes including an IEEE Hewlett-Packard/Harriett B. Rigas Award, being an Elected Fellow of IEEE and the International Speech Communication Association and a University of Washington (UW) College of Engineering Faculty Research Innovator Award. She is currently serving as the IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President of Publications. Her research interests include dynamic statistical models of speech and language, computational models of prosody at the interface of speech and language, and social aspects of language.

Professor Jaime Schultz Senior Scholars

Jaime earned a BA in English and Spanish from Luther College (Decorah, Iowa), and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Iowa. She is an associate professor of Kinesiology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State. Jaime specializes in sport history, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. She will use her time at the University of Technology, Sydney to pursue research that considers the interactions between culture and sporting bodies.

Professor Matthew Clarke Professional Scholars

Matthew is currently Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University and an executive member of the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership (CHL).

Matthew will use his Fulbright Scholarship in Non-Profit Leadership to spend three months at Save the Children USA, Harvard University and Tufts University to develop formal relationships between these institutions and the CHL. These partnerships will enhance the professional development of humanitarian workers in responding to complex humanitarian emergencies. Working with Save the Children USA, Matthew will increase connections between aid agencies in the U.S. and the CHL in Australia and create new professional development initiatives that respond specifically to the needs of humanitarian workers responding to disasters in North and South America.

Dr Louise Byrne Postdoctoral Scholars

Louise is a Lived Experience Mental Health academic. Her work is informed by her personal experience of significant mental health challenges, service use, and periods of healing.

During her Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship, Louise will work in the Yale University Program for Recovery and Community Health.  Louise’s research focuses on the emerging lived experience mental health workforce and will explore factors that assist in the successful inclusion of lived experience roles within the wider workforce. These roles contribute to better outcomes for mental health service users.  However, the lived experience workforce faces many barriers.  Findings will be compared to Louise’s previous studies in Australia and used to inform the development of a toolkit to aid the inclusion of lived experience roles.

Amy Dennison Postgraduate Students

Amy works for the Northern Territory Government in energy and environment policy. She is interested in how government and industry can ensure the ecologically sustainable development of non-renewable resources. Amy has a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering with first class Honours and the University Medal and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New South Wales. She placed first and received the Dean’s Medal for her Master of Laws in Mineral Law and Policy from the University of Dundee in the UK. Amy has worked as an environmental engineer in India, a corporate lawyer in Sydney and New York, and with traditional Aboriginal owners as a land rights and native title lawyer in the Northern Territory.

Amy will use the Fulbright Scholarship to undertake a mid-career Masters of Public Affairs at a leading Public Policy school in the United States. Her long-term goal is to lead the development of policies and laws that will ensure the sustainable development of energy and resource projects in Australia.

Kerry Hamilton Postgraduate Students

Kerry is originally from Rockville Centre, New York and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2008 with a BA in Public Health and in 2009 with a MHS in Environmental Health Sciences. She completed her Master’s thesis work on well water quality in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania where she sampled wells for contaminants and interviewed well-owners about treatment and use practices. Following her Master’s work, Kerry was an Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) fellow for two years at the US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development. Kerry is currently a doctoral student at Drexel University where she is advised by Dr. Charles Haas. Her research interests are quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA), dose-response modelling, green infrastructure, and water quality. She is also president of the student organization Drexel Graduate Women in Science and Engineering which organizes academic, social, and community outreach events for graduate students and the Philadelphia community. Outside of the lab, Kerry loves running, hiking, skiing, soccer, and generally anything outdoors! She is extremely honored to have received the opportunity to research, learn, and form new friendships in Australia as a Fulbright-CSIRO Postgraduate Scholar.

During her ten month Fulbright Scholarship, Kerry plans to measure concentrations of waterborne pathogens in roof-harvested rainwater tanks and model their association with meteorological factors. She will also compare two different laboratory methods and conduct a risk assessment to inform Australian public health policies in the laboratories of Dr. Simon Toze and Dr. Warish Ahmed at the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Agency (CSIRO). Outside of the lab, she plans pursue integrated water resources management coursework at the University of Queensland, volunteer through the CSIRO “Scientists in Schools” Program, and expand the Brisbane chapter of CSIRO Women in Science.

Victor Anthony Lopez-Carmen Postgraduate Students

Victor Lopez-Carmen earned a B.S. degree (Health Sciences and Chemistry) with honors from Ithaca College in May, 2017. As an enrolled member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe with Yaqui heritage, he has a strong will to utilize his background in health, science, and advocacy to serve Indigenous Peoples globally.

Through his Fulbright award, Victor will attain a Master of Public Health at Western Sydney University while conducting a project with urban Aboriginal families who have sent their children to boarding schools. Using Indigenous methodology, in-depth conversational interviews, and group yarning circles, he will articulate the reasons, needs, feelings, expectations and experiences of Aboriginal parents & carers who have sent or are sending their Aboriginal children to urban boarding schools. The project will fill a void in the research that will allow better understanding of how boarding is experienced by Aboriginal families in urban contexts. The implications of this research can be used to provide concrete recommendations and info to assist boarding schools when engaging with Aboriginal families of Aboriginal boarding school students, thus creating educational environments that better promote sociocultural health and resilience

David Ian Rawson Postgraduate Students

David graduated from the University of Queensland in 2012 with dual degrees in Arts and Secondary Education, majoring in English and French. His Honours study in the field of Communication and Cultural Studies saw him named valedictorian and a recipient of a University Medal.

Now in his fourth year of teaching at St Ursula’s College, Toowoomba, a Catholic girls’ school in the Ursuline tradition, David’s passion for education has seen him make a significant impact in the learning and lives of his students. He coaches debating, works to promote the status of language learning and cultures within the school and mentors the student leadership council. He has marked the Queensland Core Skills (QCS) Test for tertiary admission and moderates Senior French Work Programs and assessment on his district’s review panel. He furthered his language study in the south of France as part of an Endeavour Language Teacher Fellowship, awarded by the Commonwealth Government (2014).

David’s research into adolescent brain development and Middle Schooling Philosophy was instrumental in providing a theoretical underpinning for his school’s Year 7 Program ahead of Queensland’s shift to Year 7 into secondary in 2015. For these endeavours, he was awarded the Dr Roger Hunter Excellence in Beginning to Teach Award (2014). David was selected to have his pedagogy showcased as part of the Queensland College of Teachers’ ClassMovies Project. His finished documentary serves as a fine model for other early-career practitioners with clear strategies identified for addressing The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

David is the Chairperson of his College’s Assessment Review Steering Committee, which enables him to explore his special interest area of, and deep passion for, assessment. He leads a team of six teachers to review current practice and to develop a College-wide blueprint that will present more effective ways of assessing students’ learning.

David’s research in the United States of America aims to better understand how re-conceptualising assessment might bring about broader school improvement. In particular, he wishes to develop more engrained and sustainable mechanisms for fostering effective teacher collaboration in Queensland schools. In this way, David hopes to develop a strategy for supporting teachers to engage more routinely with peer-reviewed research and integrate it into their praxis. He sees it as important to address the disjunct between educational theory and practice, which has emerged alongside the growing demands on teachers and their time.

David is looking forward to engaging in cross-cultural conversations with other engaged and dynamic teachers, developing a deeper knowledge of curriculum and educational leadership.