Detecting myrtle rust (Austropuccinia psidii) on lemon myrtle trees using spectral signatures and machine learning
By: Heim, René HJ, Ian J. Wright, Hsing‐Chung Chang, Angus J. Carnegie, Geoff S. Pegg, Emily K. Lancaster, Daniel S. Falster, and Jens Oldeland. Plant Pathology. | Find with Google Scholar »
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Dear all,
This week has been another busy one. The Department’s Leadership team met on Monday to see how we are going with our strategic plan for the year – lots of interesting activities are underway, from supporting strategic funding and industry engagement to increase research impact, to new initiatives in learning & teaching, aboriginal engagement, diversity & inclusion, and outreach. I thank everyone for their hard work and commitment to ensure the long-term success of our department!
See you all at the Diversity & Inclusion lunch on Wednesday, before the seminar.
Cheers,
Michelle
Save the Date
This coming week 28th May – 1st June
Tue 29: Grant Writing Groups Kick-off Meeting; 1.00pm – 1.30pm; Biology Tea Room.
Wed 30: Department Morning Tea; 10.30am – 11am; Biology Tea Room.
Wed 30: Workshop – ‘Developing Your 5-year Research Plan’; 12.00 – 1.00pm, 12WW (E7A) level 8.
Wed 30: Diversity and Inclusion Lunch; 12.00 – 1.00pm, Biology Courtyard. Bring a plate to share!
Wed 30: Department Seminar – Dr Iadine Chades, CSIRO; 1.00pm – 2.00pm; Biology Tea Room.
Thu 31: R Users’ Group Meeting; 3.00pm – 5.00pm; Biology Tea Room.
Following week 4th – 8th June
Tue 5: Department Meeting; 1.00pm – 2.00pm; Biology Tea Room with lunch before @ 12:30pm.
Wed 6: Department Morning Tea; 10.30am – 11am; The Hill.
Wed 6: Department Seminar – Prof. Saul Cunningham, Fenner School, ANU; 1.00pm – 2.00pm; Biology Tea Room.
Thu-Fri 7-8: Department Annual HDR conference.
Coming Up
July 24-25: Research Enrichment Program – Outlook Conference “The Future of the Human Landscape”; Incubator Building, MQU.
General News and Announcements
Congratulations to Guyo Gufu for taking out the coveted Tony Price Award for 2018. Well done!
Guyo Gufu with HoD Michelle Leishman
And, Birgit Szabo has received the Rice Field Research Proposal Award for 2018! Congratulations!
Birgit Szabo HDR student with HoD Michelle Leishman
Diversity & Inclusion Lunch Launch – Wednesday 30th May 2018 – Biology Courtyard
Everyone is invited to join in for the Diversity and Inclusion Lunch Launch. It will be held in the E8 Biology Courtyard (or E8A 280 Biology Tearoom if raining), Wednesday 30th May 2018 from 11.30 am to 1 pm. Please bring along a plate from your country/culture to share. We will along have special guests Taiko no Wa entertaining us with a Japenese drumming performance! To assist us to manage the food, could you please tell us what you are bringing by filling out the spreadsheet (google doc)? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dIsYysBl1f8Yr8PChZxvHFI8ilVsUvyFxeP63VLe8GE/edit#gid=767026791
Did you know? The department in the news
Jenny Ghabache has analysed the university media stories and you may be surprised to learn that the Faculty of Science and Engineering accounts for ~25% of all MQ’s media stories, and the Department of Biological Sciences accounts for over 51% of all the Faculty’s media stories. So keep up the good work in getting those media releases out about about your research!
RESEARCH STORIES, OUTCOMES AND OPPORTUNITIES
2018-19 Fisheries Scientific Committee Student Research Grant round now open – The Fisheries Scientific Committee (FSC) is now accepting applications for the 2018-19 Student Research Grants Round. The FSC has available $3,000 to fund 1-2 student projects, aimed at filling gaps in research information for threatened or potentially threatened species of fish and marine vegetation in NSW. The grants are intended for use by undergraduate 3rd year major project students, or as part of an Honours, Masters or PhD project. Projects funded through the Student Research Grants provide the FSC with information on threatened aquatic species and communities to help support their listing, conservation and management. This information is also assists in managing species recovery through initiatives undertaken by NSW Department of Primary Industries.
How to apply – Visit the FSC website to access the online application form. Applications close 11.59 pm (AEDT) on Tuesday 31 July 2018.
Participate in the Falling Walls Lab Australia 2018 – The Academy invites applications from Australian researchers, postdocs and students, entrepreneurs, engineers and innovators from all areas to attend the Falling Walls Lab Australia 2018. Deadline for applications is 5pm (AEST) Monday 28th May 2018. 20 contestants will be invited to participate in this challenge with each required to give a 3 minute presentation on their research work, business model, social idea or initiative based on the “Which walls will fall next” concept. Candidates should be research active in any field of the natural sciences, including technology, engineering and medicine as well as social sciences and humanities. Follow this link to view more information and to apply.
LEARNING AND TEACHING
Want to Develop your Teaching Portfolio? HEA Fellowship Opportunity
Macquarie academics and professional staff can now have their education practice and experience recognised through the Higher Education Academy (HEA) Fellowship program. These Fellowships provide international recognition of personal and institutional commitment, and professionalism, in higher education. HEA fellowships also look great on promotion applications, fitting into the categories of:
Professional development and/or accreditation: Record of continuous professional development, including through internal or external accreditation schemes (e.g. Higher Education Academy).
Scholarship of Learning and Teaching: Articulation of clear personal teaching philosophy with evidence of reflection and response to a range of evaluative feedback (this needs to be addressed in the HEA application).
This year MQ is funding applications for staff, including tutors and professional staff. Due to budget cuts this funding is not guaranteed for 2019 (~$5000 per person), so if you are interested please attend an info session to register. The work involved in applications increases with each level, but there are writing workshops and opportunities to have your application reviewed before submission to help. Contact Kath McClellan if you are interested <katherine.mcclellan@mq.edu.au>.
SEMINARS AND WORKSHOPS
Biological Sciences Weekly Seminar
Date/Time/Venue: Wednesday, 30th May 2018, 1 – 2pm, 14EAR (E8A)-280 Biology Tearoom.
Speaker: Dr Iadine Chades, CSIRO. Title: Advances in Artificial Intelligence to help decision making in conservation. More information at https://goto.mq.edu.au/biologyseminar2018-abstracts
MolSci Weekly Seminar
Date/Time/Venue: Tuesday, 29th May 2018, 1 – 2pm, 4WW (F7B) 422 APAF seminar room. Speaker: Dr Megan Huggett, Lecturer in Marine Science, the University of Newcastle. Title: Understanding future impacts of temperature on marine microbiomes. For more information visit – https://goto.mq.edu.au/6s
Grant Writing Groups Kick-off Meeting – Organised by Andrew Barron. Grant writing groups to set up peer review and peer support for all stages of grant development, and take the mad dash and pain out of grant writing. Intro meeting to set up grant writing groups will be Tuesday 29th May 1pm in the tea room. It’ll only be a 30 min-ish meeting to introduce the concept and begin setting up teams. If you have any grant aspirations in 2019 please do come along. This will help.
John Morris Group (JMG) is organising a workshop on scRNA Seq and Single Cell Droplet Microfluidics together with Dolomite Bio at the Garvan institute. You must register if you are attending. To register your interest or for further information, please email Karl Gunasekaran at <kgunasekaran@johnmorrisgroup.com>. Invitation here
Call for Abstracts and Registration Now Open – The Macquarie Neurodegeneration Meeting is an inaugural event hosted by the Centre for Motor Neuron Disease Research, Macquarie University. The aim of this event is for Australian neuroscientists to showcase their research and to stimulate conversation and foster collaboration to develop treatments for diseases including motor neuron disease, Alzheimer’s disease, frontal temporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease and other degenerative brain disorders. We have assembled a program which will feature several keynote speakers.
Research Enrichment Program – Outlook Conference
July 24-25, Incubator Building, Macquarie University – “The Future of the Human Landscape”
The Outlook Conference (Research Enrichment Program Outlook Flyer) will bring together leading thinkers in diverse disciplines, spanning molecules to landscapes, and from scientific, historical and social viewpoints. Speakers at 2018 Outlook conference include Professor Tim Flannery (Writer and Social Commentator), Professor Angela Moles (UNSW), Associate Professor Greg Downey (MQ) and Professor Rob Brooks (UNSW). The objective of Outlook is to immerse participants in the frontiers of adjacent, and more distant disciplines. Speakers will present their vision for humanity’s future. These talks will not recount personal research findings, but will be future-scoping exercises. Our goal is to identify promising areas for high level trans-disciplinary collaboration, for novel applications, and to expose postgraduate students and early career researchers to different ways of thinking. REP Outlook is free and open to all. Please register for REP Outlook here
Developing Your 5-year Research Plan – Wednesday 30 May (12-1pm), level 8 E7A – Delivered by Andrew Barron. Hitting any mid- and long-term research and career goals is impossible if you don’t know what they are. This seminar discusses how you can identify what you want to do, and how you can plan to give yourself the greatest chance of hitting your targets. No need to register, simply turn-up. Please bring a pen and some paper with you.
R Users Group – Visualising phylogenies in R, Thursday 31st May @3pm in the Biology Tearoom – Amy Tims will provide an overview of basic tools for visualising phylogenies in R. Quite often for presentations, papers or project work, people need to show consensus or overview phylogenies of groups. These may need to highlight specific features or character states, or show differential rates of evolution across branches. R is a powerful tool for these types of visualisations.
aaRgh (ask an R geek for help) – Second Thursday of every month 3 – 4pm, Biology Tearoom – 14EAR (E8A) 280. Frustrated? Having an R-related problem? We will also run regular afternoon tea sessions where you can get one-on-one help, or just introduce yourself and chat. Snacks provided!
Writing Workshops – Running weekly for most of the year: Fridays 2-4pm in room E8B 111. Convened by Ken Cheng.
These writing workshops are meant for HDR students and early-career researchers. In these face-to-face encounters, writing at any stage of any genre is welcome, from first draft to final polish, from empirical paper to literature review to popular news story. Ken envisages personal feedback linked perhaps with rounds of revisions on selected passages during the session. The aim is not just to get stuff written, but to write everything well. Those interested in attending a session should email Ken Cheng <ken.cheng@mq.edu.au> by Wednesday 12:00-noon, preferably with a draft attached of what they are working on and some indication of what they especially need help with.
ADMIN THINGS
Do you want to learn how to use the features of your Avaya desk phone handset? Check out this guide for more instructions. 1608__MM_guide
PURE Training – The PURE system is used to manage researcher profiles, outputs including publications, funding applications, awards, projects and reports. Do you feel like you could use some more PURE training? Please register your interest via an email to <jenny.ghabache@mq.edu.au>.
OUTREACH ACTIVITIES – Have you participated in an activity for Biology recently? Don’t forget to fill in the super-quick form here – ACCESS OUTREACH FORM HERE
Photo Competition – May 2018 – Enter to win a $100 Gift Card this month!
This month’s theme is COLOUR! Your images could be used on our Department website, this newsletter, on our social media and in other biology publications. A lucky person’s name will be drawn each month, and they will receive a $100 Gift Card! Criteria: you must provide caption information including details of what/where/who(names of people)/date & you must have taken all photos & the image was taken in the last five years. Please follow the dropbox file request link to submit your images. Submission close: 30 MAY 2018 You can enter as many photos as you like – one entry to the draw for each good photo, good luck!
And the winner of last month’s comp – All creatures great and small – has just been announced! Congratulations to Prasanth Subramani!
Location-W (Fauna Park) Admin Support – Monday, Wednesday & Friday from 10am – 1pm in W19F.
Deliveries – You will notice that we have placed a red “transfer Box” in W19F, put anything in this box that needs to be delivered to the E8 area location. We also have a red “Transfer Box” in E8B Level 2 location, which is for goods to betaken to the W location. These boxes will be emptied every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10am. Deliveries from the main “MQ” store will be delivered daily. Any questions please contact Sharyon O’Donnell.
Building Name Changes – Cheat Sheet – If you are trying to identify buildings on campus with new names or old names, please use this link to convert them from old to new or vice versa.
Correct Method for Submitting to Department Matters
Department Matters submissions now have their own email address. Please send all future submissions to the newsletter to <fse.bionewsletter@mq.edu.au>!
Also, please see the following to correctly format your additions, and keep them rolling in!
You may have noticed that we try to keep all the articles to the same format for the Department Matters, however, rest assured, they do NOT all turn up in this format! To help keep your Department Matters looking as good as possible, when sending in additions to the Newsletter, please try to keep these formatting guidelines in mind.
- Please write in third person. The information is coming from the Newsletter, not directly from you.
- Do not use fancy text formatting. Bold heading, normal text, and only italics or bold to highlight. No font size changes will make it through, sorry.
- If sending via email, set your email output to basic. HTML output will add all sort of formatting that will have to be removed before your article can go into the newsletter.
Keeping to these guidelines will streamline your article’s addition to the newsletter. Thank you.
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SUSTAINABILITY
Worm Castings and Juice Available for Your Home Garden – In the Biology courtyard (next to the fern bed) are our wonderful worm farms. This week we harvested some of the worm castings and emptied off the worm juice – which is a bit of a slurry. This stuff is full of nutrients and great mixed into the garden. The juice should be diluted approx 10:1, and the solids can make around 20% of the soils volume (more for vegie gardens). Please help yourself – BYO container.
Sustainability Survey – Surveys have been emailed, and hard copies are in place outside the Biology tearoom, and in the E8C ground floor foyer. Please help this department become more sustainable by having your say on what you think the priorities are. Write a post it note, place a tick, or email Samantha Newton <samantha.newton@mq.edu.au> with your feedback.
BLOGS AND OTHER THINGS OF INTEREST
Plant of the Week!
This week, French Marigolds – Tagetes patula. Much to our amusement, we find that both French and African Marigolds (Tagetes patula, Tagetes erecta) come from Mexico, not from Europe or from Africa. Commercial production of the natural insecticide Pyrethrum is usually from the Dalmatian Chrysanthemum (Tanacetum cinerarium), but Pyrethrum is also present in Tagetes species.
New Publications
Have your cake and eat it too: greater dispersal ability and faster germination towards range edges of an invasive plant species in eastern Australia
By: Tabassum, Samiya, and Michelle R. Leishman. Biological Invasions: 1-12. | Find with Google Scholar »Isolation rearing does not constrain social plasticity in a family-living lizard
By: Riley, Julia L., Côme Guidou, Caroline Fryns, Johann Mourier, Stephan T. Leu, Daniel WA Noble, Richard W. Byrne, and Martin J. Whiting. Behavioral Ecology 29, no. 3 (2018): 563-573. | Find with Google Scholar »The influence of diet and environment on the gut microbial community of field crickets
By: Ng, Soon Hwee, Michael Stat, Michael Bunce, and Leigh W. Simmons. Ecology and evolution (2018). | Find with Google Scholar »EFFECTS OF ESTUARINE ACIDIFICATION ON AN OYSTER-ASSOCIATED COMMUNITY IN NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA
By: Glaspie, Cassandra N., Sarah R. Jenkinson, and Rochelle D. Seitz. Journal of Shellfish Research 37, no. 1 (2018): 63-72. | Find with Google Scholar »Virological sampling of inaccessible wildlife with drones
By: Geoghegan, J.L., Pirotta, V., Harvey, E.; Smith, A., Buchmann, J.P., Ostrowski, M., Eden, J., Harcourt, R., Holmes, E.C. 2018. Preprints 2018050184 (doi: 10.20944/preprints201805.0184.v1). | Find with Google Scholar »A comparison of methods for estimating substitution rates from ancient DNA sequence data
By: Tong, K.J., Duchêne, D.A., Duchêne, S., Geoghegan, J.L. Ho, S.Y.W. 2018. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 18:70. | Find with Google Scholar »Effects of vegetation density on habitat suitability for the green and golden bell frog Litoria aurea
By: Fardell, L., Valdez, J., Klop-Toker, K., Stockwell, M., Clulow, S., Clulow, J. & Mahony, M. (2018). Herpetological Conservation and Biology, 13(1): 47-57. | Find with Google Scholar »In the Media
Chris Reid was mentioned in National Geographic
Dr Chris Reid from the Department of Biological Sciences was mentioned in National Geographic regarding research into slime mold intelligence.
Vanessa Pirotta featured on Radio National
Vanessa Pirotta from the Department of Biological Sciences featured on Radio National regarding her winning Famelab entry using drones to take snot samples from whales.