Education and Clean Tech Futures with Malaysia
Alan Duffy
A whirlwind 2-day tour learning about the incredible investments and ambitions this nation has in creating an advanced economy through science and technology - the opportunities for Australia to support AND learn from this generational shift are enormous, and I’m proud that together with our colleagues at Swinburne’s Sarawak and Australian campuses we can support that change through cutting edge research to enhance businesses as well as staff training in these new economies, but just as importantly creating industry-ready graduates thanks to guaranteed work placements throughout their courses.
It was an honour to visit Her Excellency the High Commissioner for Australia in Malaysia Ms Danielle Heinecke (and super-star team including Fiona Morris and Michael Ting) and learn of the exciting partnerships that Australia is driving in Malaysia, supporting its ambitions to be a leader in key areas such as energy/hydrogen, CleanTech, critical minerals, and so much more…
Being hosted at Asia School of Business by Dr Pieter Stek in their stunning campus was a treat, just as impressive as the architecture was the level of policy work being undertaken by his institute in identifying global best practice policy in the energy transition and seeing those learnings shared across Malaysia.
I was also fortunate to find myself and the team Top 5 Finalists across all of APAC for our Swinburne-mDetect collaboration to safeguard the world’s mine outputs (known as tailings) using advanced muon sensors at the illustrious TripleE awards. The images are truly amazing from that event!
I also got to kickstart that trip learning about Lynas Rare Earths Ltd impressive efforts in advancing extraction and processing of critical minerals, my thanks to Jiawen Ding and Luke Darbyshire for educating me on the leaps that Lynas is making up the value chain, and the potential for Swinburne to support these advances.
The transformative technologies for harnessing the energy potential of the ocean (OTEC) led by Prof Dato' Ir Dr Abu Bakar Jaafar of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia was eye-opening, and just as impressive are the outstanding leadership team of A/Prof Nur Azaliah Abu Bakar growing this prestigious university’s research and educational achievements. Certainly I hope to see our students as well as staff engage on key research areas!
The team at Institute of Strategic & International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia are truly amazing thought-leaders in those key areas of bilateral interest, in which we had a very wide-ranging discussion, on critical minerals, energy transition, and hydrogen. If you’re curious about knowing techno-economics of the energy transition, environmental monitoring, or going up the critical mineral processing value chain in Malaysia I suggest you reach out to Qarrem K., Afandi Nor Azmi and Dhana Raj Markandu.
Again, my thanks to all who hosted and educated me over these two days, it was a pleasure to meet you all - and have the chance in return to share the exciting work of Swinburne. Work across all our campuses in research and education that I believe can do so much to advance both Malaysia and Australia in these areas of immense common interest and potential.