You're looking at Swinburne University of Technology's new Pro Vice Chancellor, Flagship Initiatives 🙌The PVCFI is a new role tasked with driving large and ambitious transdisciplinary research across our flagship research areas by actively engaging with external organisations (including government, industry, NGOs) to identify large-scale opportunities that require university-wide collaboration and the formation of coalitions of universities and partners.

I spoke to Australian space pioneer Dr Chris Boshuizen at the Powerhouse Museum about his efforts in space… from a small country town, to co-founding Planet Labs (now the largest Earth Observing satellite fleet in history) to provide open and accessible satellite-based planet monitoring (if you have used Google Maps, you’ve used his company’s images!) and then fulfilling his lifelong dream of space travel onboard the second Blue Origin New Shepard flight in October 2021, making Chris the third Australian in space

An exhaustive study by the amazing Swinburne PhD student Matthew Humbert into creating a more accurate framework for exploring the extraction of desired metals from lunar regolith (i.e. the Moon’s soil) that might support future astronauts exploring the Solar System.

It was an incredible honour to host the inaugural Australian Space Summit held in Sydney, bringing together inspiring industry leaders to share with colleagues nationwide the tools and strategies to break into the domestic and global supply chain. I can’t wait for next year!

The final published work from my PhD student Adam Batten’s excellent Thesis centred around the use of the enigmatic, and very much still unknown, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) as probes of the nature of the galaxies they shine through.

After years of work from teams worldwide, we are finally nearing the completion of the deepest underground physics laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere all searching for dark matter!

So it was a double thrill that I could take one of Australia's biggest shows - Network 10's #TheProjectTV - on a tour of this Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory

he incredible Gaia spacecraft has been monitoring the almost imperceptible drift of the stars in our Milky Way for the last decade, allowing us to measure their exact 3D position using the powerful parallax method. Yet even these measures can be improved in time as this work by Swinburne’s Dr Chris Flynn shows.

I’m beyond thrilled to celebrate our Space Institute PhD student Matt Shaw and his incredible win at the 3MT APAC international finals. Against entries by 54 universities from around the region his work on mining the moon to provide metals for constructing moonbases (seriously how cool is his Thesis) was found the most engaging - considering you have just Three Minutes(!) to explain three years of work, his efforts to connect with the audience are nothing short of amazing

When it comes to mining the Moon, and how best to extract those critical resources, for fuelling our further exploration of the Solar System this massive review paper will be seen as a critical resource itself! Incredibly work by Matthew Shaw and Matthew Humbert, two doctoral candidates within the Extraterrestrial Resource Processing group led by Profs Geoff Brooks and Akbar Rhamdhani, at Swinburne’s Space Technology and Industry Institute.

Incredible news as one of the largest Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative grants ($2.325M from Gov, for a total expenditure of $4.65M) is awarded to Titomic and Swinburne!

A seamlessly connected world, where information streams effortlessly across people, industry, cities, farms and satellites. In which data that originates from Earth is conveyed and used as easily as the data generated from sensors in orbit. All of which is combined to inform decisions in either domain.

This is the Internet of Space Things (IoST), and it is the natural future extension of the internet as the predominant communications and data-exchange structure of our time. We already have half a dozen devices connected to the Internet of Things for every person on Earth, producing 79 ZETA bytes of information (that’s nearly a million million 4k movies worth of data!) by 2025, the options in using this data are endless and the future is seamless.

In this outstanding work my PhD student Matthew Shaw has explored ways to process the Moon’s surface (known as regolith) into its valuable metals and oxygen using concentrated sunlight. This technique, known as pyrolysis, can liberate these resources for use by NASA’s program Artemis and their return to the Moon in a framework called In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU).

A wonderful new paper by my student Adam Batten. Mysterious explosions occur across the sky from distant galaxies, visible only with radio telescopes, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). There illuminate the intervening material as they travel to our telescopes, allowing us to probe that otherwise hard to image Cosmic Web. But how do we know what that should look like? Simulations like EAGLE predict that distribution and in this beautiful work by Adam we can therefore shine simulated FRBs through this to create predictions for the dispersion measure. This then is directly tested by the telescopes.

This paper was a delight to write, with two young scientists (Jamie Heredge and Jay Archer) undertaking an incredible amount of work to generate muon events passing through a model-plastic scintillator and demonstrating that AI can recover the potential intersection of that event better than an analytic model.

The final paper from Shanti Krishnan’s extraordinary PhD! This work is focused on a general purpose slow control system to remotely monitor experiments with a range of sensors, in a cost-effective but still entirely reconfigurable setup that scales as your experiment does. Amazing work and one that will support others in their research efforts we hope, as the designs are all provided for further use!

I'm beyond thrilled to announce that I have been appointed the inaugural Director of the new Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne University of Technology !

I can’t wait to help companies and communities solve their problems on Earth through Space, together with my amazing Swinburne colleagues.

The latest CREDO paper is out, demonstrating that the signals we detect using your smartphone really are from cosmic rays. The way we can tell is that there is are many more cosmic rays hitting you (and your phone’s CCD!) from directly above relative to the horizon. This is a cosine squared dependency, and with some very clever modelling the team showed we could recover such a profile (as well as measuring the thickness of the CCD in the phones used in the study too which is neat!)

This is a staggering, and very surprising, announcement by the Australian Space Awards to name me the Academic of the Year! This is particularly so given the incredible and world-leading efforts of my fellow finalists in this category.

Space is a multidisciplinary domain so my individual Award is actually a team Award in reality - and one that recognises my extraordinary Swinburne colleagues (Virginia Kilborn, Bronwyn Fox, James Davern and Geoff Brooks to name but a few!) who have worked so hard to make our collective efforts deserving of this recognition, efforts that are truly out of this world.

The wider CREDO team in this paper took a step forward in complexity by connecting up four CosmicWatch detectors together and confirm that this low-cost commodity based detector can see extensive air showers as the cosmic rays cause a spread out cascade of particles by the time they reach the Earth’s surface. This work shows just how cost-effective it can be for even schools let alone universities to explore this region of ultra-high energy particle physics!

My colleague A/Prof Edward ‘Ned’ Taylor did a spectacular job in this monster paper teasing out the connection between properties of the galaxy and its mass… the end result? The dark matter halo mass is more tightly linked to the galaxy’s structure than either the past or current star formation. That means that the stars that make up the galaxies structure are not as relevant as the size of the dark matter halo around it - which traditionally is assumed to play a minor, if any, role in that structure. A wonderful and counterintuitive result, congrats Ned!

Another amazing electronics paper from my PhD student Shanti Krishnan accepted for publication in the Journal of Instrumentation, focussed on a novel (and very cheap!) way to improve SiPM sensors.

Over a decade ago I first came to Australia (Perth to be specific!) to work on the incredible CSIRO constructed Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, and in particular the WALLABY / DINGO survey, that would scan the sky in radio and advance our knowledge in so many areas - how many? Well this exhaustive review article just accepted in ApSS can tell you!

A big moment for the global project on cosmic ray detection - CREDO - which is attempting to find super-cosmic ray shows that scatter high energy particles across continent scales. Our first published paper, now accepted in Astroparticle Physics, focusses on the detection of such events by next-generation Gamma-ray detectors like the Cherenkov Telescope Array. Huge congrats to Dariusz and Kévin who led this work. Can’t wait for the next batch of pre-print papers to be accepted too..!

Together with principal supervisor Prof Geoff Brooks, I co-supervise a fantastic PhD student Matt Shaw on techniques to mine the moon (or rather how to process the regolith you mine!) He gave a fantastic talk on the Moon as part of the wonderful What If? series of lectures organised by the City of Boroondara where Swinburne’s Hawthorn campus is based. Great work Matt!

A mammoth undertaking with my colleague Dr Francis Froborg to write a review on dark matter detection methods covering 230 other articles, focussed on the annual modulation as the Earth goes around the Sun and apparent strength of the dark matter headwind changes over the seasons. Accepted in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics and available to all on arXiv. Also my thanks to the incredible James Josephides of Swinburne Astronomy Productions for his beautiful and informative infographic!

I was amazed to find myself nominated as Academic of the Year in the inaugural Space Connect Australian Space Awards but to find myself now a finalist is beyond ridiculous..! Thankfully the Honour of being alongside such incredible finalists is all I need, as there's no way I'm winning against such legends.

Just received news from the Swinburne University of Technology promotions panel - I am now a full PROFESSOR!

Particularly pleasing in this (and the reason I want to ask your indulgence in this scandalous self-promotion) is that the promotion committee considered the entire range of my research, teaching and engagement. Swinburne truly is a place that has supported my full range of activities and values the research papers I write just as much as the science discoveries I explain to the community.

I don’t want this to sound like an Oscar acceptance speech but this is truly an incredible (and humbling!) honour to serve on the Australian Space Agency’s inaugural Space Industry Leader’s Forum. It’s even more humbling when you see my fellow exceptionally experienced and talented colleagues on this Forum…!

It was a career highlight for me to be the MC for the Nation’s most prestigious awards, the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science, and that it was the 20th anniversary just made it all the more amazing to be a part of, for me. The end result that a majority of awards went to women (for the first time!) made that experience even more wonderful.

I am thrilled (and also a little intimidated!) to join the Questacon Advisory Council and help, in whatever small way I can!, Australia’s leading science communication and engagement centre. Each year, Questacon welcomes over 500,000 visitors to the two facilities in Canberra while more than 660 000 see their exhibitions in other museums and centres around Australia and overseas. Outreach programmes take to the roads each year, visiting an additional 110 000 in towns and communities across the country.