The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (37 page)

PROFESSOR MERLIN CROSSLEY is Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales. He studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and has carried out research on genetic diseases at Oxford, Harvard, Sydney and UNSW. He serves on the Trust of the Australian Museum, the Boards of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Science Media Centre, NewSouth Innovations and UNSW Press Ltd. He is an enthusiastic science communicator.

PROFESSOR TANYA MONRO is Deputy Vice Chancellor: Research and Innovation and an ARC Georgina Sweet Laureate Fellow, University of South Australia. Tanya received the Bragg Gold Medal (best Physics PhD in Australia) and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, at the University of Southampton. She served as Inaugural Director: Institute for Photonics and
Advanced Sensing, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, University of Adelaide. Tanya's numerous awards include: South Australia's ‘Australian of the Year', Scopus Young Researcher of the Year, South Australian Scientist of the Year, and the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year.

PROFESSOR ANDY PITMAN is a Professor in climate science at the University of New South Wales. He is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. His expertise is in climate modelling, with broad interests extending across climate change, climate impacts and land cover change. He has worked extensively on how land cover change and increasing greenhouse gases change the probability of extremes. He has been a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and on the Copenhagen Diagnosis. He won the NSW Climate Scientist of the Year in 2010.

Contributors

IDAN BEN-BARAK holds an MSc in microbiology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Sydney. His first book,
Small Wonders: How microbes rule our world
, won the 2010 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books, Young Adult category.
Why Aren't We Dead Yet? The survivor's guide to the immune system
, published by Scribe, is his second book. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and two children.

ELIZABETH BRYER is curious about the world and our place in it, and in her short fiction and essays writes about memory, identity and cultural imaginings, as well as the ways in which we are shaped by place, history and politics. She is a commissioning editor for art and literature magazine
Higher Arc
and is currently working on a novel and essays that combine the mundane with the mythic, as well as translating an award-winning novella. Her online home is <
www.elizabethkbryer.com
>.

GEORGE CLARK obtained tertiary degrees at Sydney and Stanford Universities followed by an engineering career that included working in Australia, the UK, France, Canada and the USA. He has a small cattle property in the central ranges of NSW where he makes wine and writes poetry, which has been published in several anthologies. He believes it to be a privilege to understand the physical world and the laws of nature to combine with the inexpressible beauty of the natural world.

TRENT DALTON writes for the award-winning
The Weekend Australian Magazine.
A former assistant editor of the
Courier-Mail
, he has won a Walkley Award for excellence in journalism, been a four-time winner of the national News Awards Feature Journalist of the Year Award, and was named Queensland Journalist of the Year at the 2011 Clarion Awards for excellence in Queensland media. He was named Features Journalist of the Year at the 2014 and 2013 Kennedy Awards for Excellence in NSW Journalism.

WILSON DA SILVA is a science writer in Sydney, and was for almost a decade the editor-in-chief of
Cosmos
, the literary science magazine he co-founded. A former science reporter at ABC TV, his writing credits include
Nature, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, New Scientist
and the
Australian Financial Review Magazin
e. He has served as president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, and is the winner of 31 awards, including the AFI for Best Documentary and the Human Rights Award for Print Journalism. <
www.wilsondasilva.com
>.

TIM DEAN is a science and technology writer and editor with over 15 years experience. He has edited
PC & Tech Authority, Cosmos
and
Australian Life Scientist
magazines, and is currently Section Editor for Science & Technology at
The Conversation.
He also has a PhD in philosophy, focusing on the intersection between evolution and ethics. With an interest in both philosophy and science, he relished the opportunity to probe quantum physicist Michio Kaku's thoughts on the nature of the mind.

ELIZABETH FINKEL spent five years at the University of California, San Francisco, studying the genes that transform a mushy egg into a shapely embryo. For the last 20 years she has been a science writer, contributing regularly to the American magazine
Science
, the ABC
Science Show
and
Cosmos
magazine, a popular
science magazine that she co-founded and of which she is now Editor in Chief. She has published two books;
Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science
and
The Genome Generation.

LAUREN FUGE is an Adelaide-based author and science communicator. Her debut YA novel
When Courage Came to Call
was published by Random House Australia in 2010, and her non-fiction has appeared in
On Dit, Australian Science
, and on her short-form blog, <
sciencesoup.tumblr.com
>. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts from Flinders University and is currently studying physics at the University of Adelaide, while working part-time as a children's science communicator and planetarium presenter. She tweets @sciencesoup.

ALICE GORMAN is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University, and a member of the Executive Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia. For the last decade, she has focused her research on the archaeology and heritage of space junk and planetary landing sites. Her blog Space Age Archaeology has been archived by the National Library of Australia as a significant scientific publication. She is a regular contributor to
The Conversation.

NICK HASLAM is Professor and Head of the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Nick's academic work as a social and clinical psychologist has explored psychiatric classification, stigma and intergroup conflict. His books include
Psychology in the Bathroom
and
Introduction to Personality and Intelligence.

JESSE HAWLEY is a lover of science and science communication. He enjoys expressing his passion through fiction and non-fiction, drawing and painting, animation, and any other way he
can (including cosmos-themed house parties on Carl Sagan Day). He prefers to write his bios in the third person, but sometimes likes to change it up: to keep up with my science-expounding escapades, you can follow me on Twitter @PenSapiens or my blog, <
pensapiens.com
>.

ELMO KEEP is an Australian writer and journalist who writes broadly on the intersection of technology, media, money and the creative industries for a variety of local and international publications including
Matter, The Awl, The Age, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Meanjin Quarterly, The Rumpus
and elsewhere. Her first book-length work of non-fiction is forthcoming with Scribe. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

CHRISTINE KENNEALLY is an award-winning journalist and author. Her book
The Invisible History of the Human Race
was shortlisted for the 2015 Stella Prize. Kenneally is a contributing editor to BuzzFeed News and has written for
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times, Slate, Time, New Scientist, The Monthly
and other publications. She has a PhD in linguistics from Cambridge University and a BA (Hons) in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University.

WILLIAM LAURANCE is a Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. A tropical conservation biologist, he is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences and former President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. He has won many prestigious international awards, including the Heineken Environment Prize and BBVA Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Award. In 2015 the Zoological Society of London named him ‘Conservationist of the Year'.

DYANI LEWIS is a freelance science writer based in Melbourne. She has a PhD in plant genetics, but now thrives on the cornucopia of science she can explore having ditched the pipettes and microscopes. Her writing has appeared in
Science, Nature Medicine, Cosmos
magazine, the ABC online and others. Dyani is a regular co-host on Triple R's
Einstein a Go-Go
radio show and has hosted and produced science episodes for
Up Close
, the University of Melbourne's podcast.

GERAINT LEWIS was born in Old South Wales, educated in the UK, and is a cosmologist at the University of Sydney. Through his research, he seeks to uncover some of the universe's biggest mysteries, especially the nature of the dark matter and dark energy which control our cosmic expansion. His research includes gravitational lensing, galactic archaeology, and large-scale structure, and his favourite force is gravity.

JOHN LONG collected fossils as a child in Melbourne. After graduating with a PhD from Monash University in 1984, he became Curator in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the WA Museum, then Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria, finally and Vice President at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, before becoming Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders University. Author of some 28 books, non-fiction and fiction, John writes regularly for
The Conversation
and
Australasian Science
magazine.

TIM LOW is a biologist, environmental consultant and prizewinning best-selling author of seven books about nature and conservation. His book
Feral Future
inspired the formation of a non-governmental organisation, the Invasive Species Council, which Tim spoke about at the 18th Global Biodiversity Forum in Mexico. He has served on the Australian environment minister's
advisory committee, and wrote a column for
Nature Australia
magazine for 20 years. His most recent book is
Where Song Began.

IAN LUNT loves the Australian bush. He worked as an Associate Professor in Vegetation Ecology at Charles Sturt University for many years, where he undertook extensive research on the ecology and conservation of endangered ecosystems. Recently Ian changed career paths to focus on writing about conservation science for a wider audience. He writes regularly about ecology on his blog, Ecology for Australia, at <
ianluntecology.com
>.

JENNY MARTIN is a Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Queensland. She trained as a pharmacist in Melbourne and undertook her DPhil at Oxford University. Jenny is a recent ARC Australian Laureate Fellow and a current NHMRC Research Fellow. Her research is devoted to the structure and function of proteins involved in health and disease. She is passionate about gender equity and diversity.

JANE MCCREDIE is an award-winning journalist, former science publisher and the author of a book on the science of sex and gender,
Making Girls and Boys
(NewSouth, 2011). She is currently executive director of the NSW Writers' Centre and writes a weekly blog on medicine for the
Medical Journal of Australia'
s electronic sister publication, <
mjainsight.com.au
>.

FIONA MCMILLAN is a science writer and blogger based in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in
Cosmos
magazine and she currently writes about immunology, cancer and genomics for the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute. Fiona has a BSc in physics and a PhD in biophysics. She has researched distant stars, extremophiles and the architecture of proteins, clocking many midnights at telescopes, lab benches, and the occasional
particle accelerator. Her science blog Luminous can be found at <
fionamcmillan.com
>.

JAMES MITCHELL CROW is deputy editor of
Cosmos
magazine. A chemist by training, James began his science-writing career with
Chemistry World
magazine, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, before joining
New Scientist
, where he worked in London as a features editor. In 2010 he left the UK to move to Australia, where he began writing freelance for various publications, including
Nature.
In May 2013 he joined the team at
Cosmos.

SARINA NOORDHUIS-FAIRFAX is a Sydney-born artist and writer. She holds degrees in Biomedical Science (University of Technology, Sydney) and Fine Arts (National Art School, Sydney), and is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Art at the Australian National University. A curator in the Australian Prints and Drawings department at the National Gallery of Australia, Sarina lives with her husband and two young children in a house full of books.

CLARE PAIN has loved science since childhood, when she avidly followed the Apollo missions and spent her time looking for fossils, watching tadpoles, growing crystals and star-gazing. In her early twenties she freelanced for
New Scientist
magazine as a hobby. She pursued a range of other careers before deciding to concentrate on science and medical writing in 2011. Clare enjoys writing about all areas of science, but has a particular soft spot for neuroscience.

GINA PERRY is a psychologist, writer, and author of
Behind the Shock Machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments
(Scribe, 2013). She has written for publications
including
The Age, The Australian, Cosmos
and
The Conversation
and co-produced the ABC Radio National documentary about the obedience experiments, ‘Beyond the Shock Machine', which won the Silver World Medal for a history documentary in the 2009 New York Festivals radio awards. She was runner-up for the 2013 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.