Global Change Scholars in the spotlight

Four UQ Global Change Scholars collaborated with leading researchers from the Group of Eight Universities (Go8) to produce the Road to Recovery report. The taskforce included a diverse range of scholars including epidemiologists, infectious disease consultants, public health specialists, healthcare professionals, mental health and well-being practitioners, Indigenous scholars, communications and behaviour change experts, ethicists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, economists and business scholars.

The taskforce used a collaboration platform from the University of Melbourne's Hunt Laboratory for Intelligence Research to submit evidence-based recommendations and provide analytic reasoning. Each member was assigned pseudonyms like 'quoll260' and 'crocodile715' in an effort to reduce social dominance effects and democratise input. 

The group agreed that the collaboration platform allowed early career researchers to rise up and confidently take on critical roles in the production of the report. “The SWARM platform allowed me to work alongside senior academics as equals on the report. My unique perspective and skills were valued, and I gained new competencies in leadership and policymaking that I plan to draw on again in the future”, Ms Hickling said. “With the anonymous approach on the platform, I felt more confident in sharing my ideas and thoughts and had a higher sense of participation in the group”, Ms Jiang said.

Ms Hickling, Ms Hyland-Wood, Ms Jiang, and Mr Schurch are PhD candidates participating in the UQ Global Change Scholars Program—an initiative that aims to produce future research leaders attuned to global trends and challenges. Hailing from Australia, the United States, Chile, and China, and with research spanning clinical psychology, government data policy, business recovery and resilience, and education, their diverse backgrounds added valuable perspectives to the independent report presented to Australian Government policymakers on April 27^th, 2020.  

The experience provided an unparalleled opportunity to contribute to an issue of national and global significance. “As a UQ Global Change Scholar and former public servant, I felt called to collaborate on this initiative. There is nothing more global, threatening and systemic than the COVID-19 pandemic. Our response as researchers should be multidisciplinary and multi-institutional”, Mr Schurch said. “It was a great opportunity to work with and exchange thoughts with experts all around Australia through a collaboration platform. It is my first time producing a report in three weeks with 100+ people, which made me very proud to be part of the taskforce”, Ms Jiang said.

The Go8 initiative also allowed the team to develop their transferable skills that are critical for their futures. “While my data collection in Australia regarding how evidence influences policymaking remains frozen, this taskforce allowed me to have great first-hand experience in the field. Curiously, while under lockdown, I had the most collaborative experience since I started my PhD”, Mr Schurch said.

Ms Hickling said, “My PhD taught me how to research but participating in initiatives such as the Roadmap to Recovery taskforce taught me how to apply my research skills to directly help the public in real time. This experience reinforces why I want to be a researcher.”

“This was an extraordinary experience to work on a project of national significance” reports Ms. Hyland-Wood. Since the Roadmap to Recovery report was released, she leveraged her UQ media training and provided interviews with national media outlets. As a result of this project, Ms. Hyland-Wood is now working with several members of the Go8 taskforce on a forthcoming journal article on public trust, transparency and civic engagement during the era of COVID-19.

The Global Change Scholars team would like to thank the UQ Graduate School and the executive leadership team for putting them forward to participate in the Go8 initiative.

Authors: Anna Hickling, anna.hickling@uq.net.au; Bernadette Hyland-Wood, b.hylandwood@uq.edu.au; 
Yawei Jiang, yawei.jiang@uq.net.au; Roberto Schurch, r.schurchsantana@uq.edu.au

Having a virtual space to interact with other students and researchers motivated Saskia to join the QAAFI student association (QSA) and thereby contribute to ideas for virtual learning activities. This is how they conceived a three-part webinar series to talk to experts from academia and industry about securing food for a growing population with a focus on sustainability.

The first session consisted of an introductory seminar about sustainable food production by The Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization based in the United States. This webinar highlighted the importance of addressing the global protein demand through research and innovation in the space of alternative proteins.

We specifically talked about current advances in the development of plant-based and cell-based meat as a sustainable way to feed the growing population with a positive impact on the environment. Moreover, the discussion brought up other important considerations for human health, such as the challenges of making plant-based meat equally nutritious to its animal counterpart.

For our second session, we invited senior researchers from QAAFI to talk about the current challenges of our food system under climate change. The combined research expertise of our panellists in meat science, plant biotechnology, food safety and nutrition allowed for an engaging conversation that touched on the science behind food production and current approaches for sustainability.

We talked about the benefit of using crop improvement to reduce land and water use, as well as implementing effective pest and disease management technologies to improve fruit productivity. Additionally, we discussed the importance of diet diversification using alternative proteins and local Australian native plants as sustainable food sources.

The session allowed us to debate about the need for improving the communication of food and nutrition science to consumers, especially because our eating habits and resulting food choices will be the drivers of our future food system.

In the third and final session we introduced a panel of speakers to talk about driving sustainability and innovation in the global food industry.

We discussed that one potential way to reduce the carbon footprint of food products could be via introducing a tax reduction for products that emit less CO2 during their life cycle.

When it comes to comparing food products in regard to their carbon footprint, we need to be critical when looking at the data. The reason for that is that a food produced via a certain technology can be highly efficient, nutritious and have a low impact, whereas the same food produced via a slightly different technology can turn out with rather poor characteristics.

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We are very pround of the following sholars who have won their school heats and competed in their Faculty/All Institutes Finals.

Special congratulations to Amanda Bordin and Kate Dutton-Regester who have won the People's Choice Awards from their Faculty Finals, now competing in the UQ 3MT Wildcard Competition!

For more details please visit the 3MT website.

Congratulations to Yang on receiving the following grants from U21 Researcher Resilience.

Writing COVID-19 and writing during COVID-19: virtual writing collective to self-empower social science PhD students within the U21 network for interdisciplinary academic writing and publishing

Lead applicant: Yang Zhao (University of Queensland), PhD student in anthropology

Co-applicants: Jiali Liu (University of Auckland), PhD student in linguistics; Huajing Yang  (University of Zurich), PhD student in anthropology

Compared to science and technology PhD students, PhD students in social sciences worldwide are inequitably impacted by COVID-19, especially those whose thesis is fieldwork-based. We have to either change, postpone, or cancel our fieldwork plans, leading to a predicament that we are unsure how to write during COVID-19 or even have no data to write. In order to establish a self-empowering community for fellow students within the U21 network, we aim to launch a writing collective to provide trainings on academic writing and publishing skills and digital research methods during COVID-19, opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative writing, and a peer support network among U21 social science PhD students.

Reimagining fieldwork in the interconnected world: ethnography-inspired digital strategies under the COVID-19 challenge

Lead applicant: Yichen Rao (University of Hong Kong), PhD student in anthropology

Co-applicants: Lili Almási-Szabó (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile), PhD student in anthropology; Yang Zhao (University of Queensland), PhD student in anthropology; Yuting Yin (UC Davis), PhD student in anthropology

Reimagining fieldwork during Covid-19 is theoretically and practically meaningful as it advances digital ethnography not simply as “fieldwork online” but as a broad system of mindsets, toolkits, and strategies to understand human interconnectedness beyond a narrow boundary of empiricism. We hope to establish a supportive network to quickly reorient the conceptualization of fieldwork, enhance our digital capabilities and respond to the pandemics with boundary-breaking digital mindsets. We will collaborate on Slack, invite explorative scholars in the U21 network to provide Zoom workshops and produce writing projects and a virtual handbook of ethnography-inspired digital strategies shareable with young researchers in the U21 network.

More information can be found here.

Congratulations! 

Danish Kazmi and  Zheng Yen Ng have made it to the QLD final of the Falling Walls Lab competition

Three finalists from this round will progress to the national final.

The livestream is Thursday 6^th August 2-4pm here.

Danielle Davenport is competing in for the 2020 Plant and Animal Sciences SMRT Grant and has made the video “A Leopard Shark Love Story” below. She is hoping to win a people’s choice grant of $25,000 which will help towards sequencing the genome of the leopard (or Zebra) shark. 

Please visit here for more details. 

Global Change Scholar and Business School PhD candidate Nkosana Mafico won several awards for his research. He is supervised by Professor Charmaine Hartel and Associate Professor Anna Krzeminska.

• 2019 Kauffman Award for the Best Student Paper on Entrepreneurship (Gender and Diversity Division) - 79th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (Boston, United States)
• 2019 Best Student Paper Award (Gender and Diversity Division) - 79th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (Boston, United States)
• 2019 Best Paper Award (Business for Society Stream) - European Academy of Management (Portugal, Lisbon)

One person’s waste glass becomes another person’s treasure

In a bid to preserve the world’s second most used natural resource – sand – University of Queensland PhD candidate Danish Kazmi has developed a sustainable solution that could reduce its use in the construction industry.

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Danish's research is also recently featured in Quarry Magazine. This story provides a relatively detailed description of his research and presents the motivation, potential benefits and preliminary findings of the study on waste glass recycling in construction. 

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Open source data the basis of research, democracy and scientifically-based decision making

Bernadette Hyland-Wood has experience in the US Environmental Protection Agency. She knows the importance of government sourced data. This is non-personal data and covers food and crop production, population health, trade data and energy data, amongst a long list of related areas. Universities and research institutions use this data as the basis of many research activities. Bernadette says open data is the equivalent of a free press. In recent years she has witnessed the suspension of some open source data. Her PhD covers organizational culture and leadership in federal science agencies in Australia and the United States. 

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Congratulations Andrea for winning through to the UQ 3MT Final! Students can cheer Andrea on at the Livestream event on 18 September. It will be held at the Red Room on the St Lucia campus. For those who can't attend, a link to watch the Livestream on your own device will be available soon. 

Attend the 3MT Livestream Event or get the Livestream link

The Queensland Mycological Society hold fungi-focused meetings every month at the herbarium of the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens. They invited Global Change Scholar Jed to speak about his research into fungus-orchid symbiosis, and his PhD project on the diverse communities of fungi that live inside plants and play an important role in plant ecology.

There was a big turnout and guests engaged in a wide-ranging discussion on fungus-plant interplay, hidden diversity and the huge potential of fungi in the realms of low-input agriculture, breakdown of plastic waste and bioprospecting for new medicines. The tone was optimistic, and mushroom-shaped chocolate shortbreads were enjoyed by all who attended.

Contact Jed Calvert.

On Wednesday 12 September, 2018, Global Change Program Scholar Samantha Nixon competed in the final of the UQ Three Minute Thesis Competition. Samantha was awarded the runner-up prize for her presentation 'Fight creepy with crawly.'

Contact Samantha Nixon.

UQ 3MT Final 2018, Runner Up - Samantha Nixon from Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) on Vimeo.

The Australian Museum Eureka Prizes reward excellence in Australian Science. Global Change Scholar, Samantha Reynolds, and her partner, Dr Brad Norman, were finalists in the 2018 Innovation in Citizen Science category, and attended the Award Dinner at Sydney Town Hall on August 29.

Samantha and Brad work with ECOCEAN, Australia’s only not-for-profit research organisation dedicated to conserving the world’s biggest fish, the whale shark. ECOCEAN uses photo-identification data collected by citizen scientists and electronic tracking technology sponsored by schools to learn more about the biology and ecology of whale sharks and to engage students in STEM learning.

They were joint runners-up and although they didn’t win, Samantha and Brad say it was a huge honour to be there. “The Eureka Prizes are like the Academy Awards for Australian science! It was great to see scientists being treated like stars and to celebrate the incredible scientific work being done in Australia” said Samantha.

Samantha, a PhD student in the School of Biological Sciences, uses the data collected by citizen scientists and STEM learners in her research into the movements and distribution of the endangered whale shark.

ECOCEAN website: www.whaleshark.org.au

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ECOCEAN/

Twitter: @ECOCEANInc

Instagram: ecocean

Contact Samantha: samantha.reynolds1@uq.net.au; 0424563472

On 22 August, Global change Scholar Daniel Seed gave a presentation about his  "A little bit of our Syria" project: Blending photography, podcasting and augmented reality.

Here's a bit more about the event:

"A little bit of our Syria" explores intimate stories of everyday life in Orman, a village in the South-West of Syria. It pairs photography, podcasts and some experimental augmented reality to recreate the narrative of leaving Australia, visiting, and leaving Syria behind at the end of each trip. The exhibition is a product of a collaboration between Rose Richani and Daniel Seed who met while studying Journalism and the University of Queensland. The exhibition works to highlight the importance of celebrating cultural diversity in Australia, and explore the sense of belonging in more than one place. Rose and Daniel worked collaboratively to create a unique art/tech/journalism project highlighting cultural diversity and Australia.

Daniel Seed is a Journalism PhD student and Global Change Scholar at The University of Queensland. Dan created a series of podcasts to provide spoken snapshots into Rose's life and explore the juxtaposition of the perceived reality of Syria from mainstream media, and the lived reality of Rose and her family.

Contact Daniel Seed.