I got a chance to speak to the space and spatial focussed Locate podcast about all things to do with space, the industry, my efforts and more. It was a lot of fun chatting with Alicia and Roshni, I hope you enjoy it too!
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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!
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It is a pleasure to be the MobileMuster Program Ambassador and support their campaign to have Australian's send in the 5 *million* broken smartphones lying around in homes nationwide. If our campaign is a success we will have recovered nearly 10,000 tonnes of precious minerals and metals, as well as the CO2 saved equivalent to planting 50000 trees. All from us collectively sending in our broken phones!
Let's #GoForZero broken phones at home this March.
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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.
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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!)
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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.
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Melbhenge is where the Sun sets at 7:57pm (get there at least 15 minutes before) at exactly 250 degrees, meaning it aligns perfectly with a mile of skyscrapers in Melbourne’s Hoddle-grid. Remember, please don’t look directly at the Sun! But viewed safely this is a truly gorgeous evening event (just enjoy J L R Reyes’s work from last year!) and finding exactly the best place to view is always important. This year it’s particularly important we move out across the city to find the best spot (tag your photo with location and #Melbhenge) as we have to ensure we keep a safe, social distance from one another. So be safe and enjoy the Sun responsibly friends.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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..!
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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!
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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!
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A fantastic initiative by The Project to showcase some science experiments you can do at home. Alongside our experiments, they also brought together amazing resources such as the free RiAus education packs or NASA STEM@Home, perfect for students or teachers (and parents!) exploring this strange new quarantined world of teaching at home.
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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.
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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.
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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…!
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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.
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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.
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