Eavesdrop On Experts

Dr Brent Coker collects memes. A lecturer in the Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, he says “I spend most of my time researching and reading and, of course, watching memes is one of my hobbies.” Dr Coker has always been fascinated by why certain things get shared more than others. “There is a lot of psychology that goes on in marketing nowadays. Quite often we rely on intrigue. But what is intrigue?” he asks. “In psychology, there’s this idea that people need to finish the story. They don’t like it when the story’s unfinished.” He uses the example of lying in bed at night when you hear a bump. “You’re not going to go to sleep very easily unless you get up out of bed and go see what that bump was, so in other words, you finish the story. We rely on that kind of thing when we’re creating content, as well, creating that intrigue,” Dr Coker says. He notes we see this pattern in super-viral content, that is content that has over one million sha

"I’m a mathematician by training but lately, I’ve started to become very interested in how mathematics can help us trust algorithms," says Kate Smith-Miles, professor of Applied Mathematics and Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers. “Algorithms are everywhere, and how we can trust them is becoming a really pressing issue. The good news is that mathematics and statistics offer some really valuable tools for us to be able to develop this trust.” Professor Smith-Miles’ research quest to stress-test optimisation algorithms has led to a large collection of intricate and beautiful 2D images, contour plots of mathematical functions that have been mathematically generated to create challenging landscapes. “The research took a direction where we’re trying to deliberately generate diverse problems, unique problems [to test the algorithms]”, Professor Smith-Miles says. “It turns out, we were able to visualise them as beautiful 2D images. We had so many, that it turned into a ne

"As humans we tend to think in pictures, so using that approach you could think of peptides as segments of protein," says Dr Troy Attard, from the Melbourne Protein Characterisation platform at the Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne. “You can think of protein like a ball of twine, a long linear string that is all scrunched up into a ball or various shapes. If you took a pair of scissors and snipped little bits of a segment of that string, that would be your peptide,” Dr Attard says. “They’re basically short proteins, which are chains of amino acids that are joined head to tail, a little bit like links in a chain.” Dr Attard explains that insulin is an example of a peptide, it’s two peptide chains that are joined by a couple of bridges. “There are a lot of small proteins that you would consider peptides and they have all manner of functions in the body including metabolism and communication.” Dr Attard synthesises, or makes, specific peptides for research. “You can manipulate peptides for whatever

"The experience of music is really a whole-brain activity," says Professor Sarah Wilson, Head of the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. “When we’re listening to music, what we see when we put people in the scanner is that large areas of their brain light up – both hemispheres. That’s because music involves many different networks or systems in the brain,” Professor Wilson says. "There’s all sorts of debate in the research literature as to why we are even musical," she adds. “When we think about music, it is something unique to being human. Other species, animals, they don’t really use music in the way that we do. They might have song, or calls, but these are more simple, for mating purposes, or the like." “No other species uses a complex musical system like we do.” Professor Wilson explains that while you’re listening to music, you’re giving your brain a general workout. “You’re not only exercising the music-related bits, you’re also exercising your memory, you’re exerc

Associate Professor Chris Reid was working as a hospital pharmacist when he saw a series of patients in a neurological ward who were not treatable. “I thought well I can only do so much as a pharmacist. I would like to actually do something at a more fundamental level,” says Associate Professor Reid, Principal Research Fellow, member of Faculty and Head of the Neurophysiology of Excitable Networks Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. “I’ve been very fortunate to be part of the genetic revolution which was started by Professor Sam Berkovic and Professor Ingrid Scheffer from the University of Melbourne. I joined Professor Steve Petrou’s lab at a time when that was very new. “Things have moved incredibly quickly over the last 25 years, which is when the first epilepsy gene was discovered, to a point now where gene therapy is becoming a reality.” Associate Professor Reid is currently developing a new treatment for epilepsy. His research project is part of BioCurate, an independent

“We’re facing what has been called this global democratic recession,” says Associate Professor Tom Daly, Deputy Director of the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne and Associate Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law at the University of Edinburgh. “What we had for decades was – especially from the mid-1970s, was an overwhelming trend – it wasn’t the universal trend, but an overwhelming trend towards democracy becoming more widespread, globally,” he says. “But if you look at every major democracy assessment organisation, they all started to register declines from about 2005 onwards. We’re not dealing with the old fashioned sort of issues like military coup d’état, we’re looking at a deterioration of democracy that happens step by step, some people call it death by a thousand cuts.” Associate Professor Daly explains that the trend in recent years is a narrative that democracies are inefficient, that they’re incapable of producing public goods like prosperity, stabilit

"I would say we have millions of dark matter particles passing through our bodies every day, continuously," says Elisabetta Barberio, Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne and the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics. “The dark matter particle gets its name because it doesn’t emit light. So, if you have a telescope, you cannot see it. But it does not only not emit light in the visible spectrum, it doesn’t emit any electromagnetic radiation, so radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet. “No matter which kind of astronomical instrument you try to look at the sky, you cannot see it,” Professor Barberio says. She explains that we know that galaxies have been formed at a certain time in the history of the universe, and they’ve been formed where there were pockets of this dark matter. So, we know that dark matter is there. “To catch dark matter that is all around us in the galaxy, we need to go deep underground because we don’t want all these cosmic rays that reach us

“There just aren’t that many different ways we can think of to attack viruses.” This is according to Associate Professor Stuart Ralph, Acting Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Melbourne. “We’ve got lots and lots of drugs for parasites and bacteria, which have lots of potentially susceptible targets, but in the case of viruses – there aren’t that many things that they actually do. “So we’re limited to a handful, maybe only a dozen, discrete processes... that would cause the virus to either stop replicating or stop our bodies getting sick because they’ve got virus inside them.” Dr Craig Morton is a Senior Research Fellow, based at the Bio21 Molecular Science & Biotechnology Institute at the University of Melbourne. He says “In the case of COVID-19, [the drugs] remdesivir and dexamethasone have both been shown to have significant impacts on medical outcomes.” “Remdesivir is a drug that targets viral replication. It wasn’t

“If you think about the history of humanity, exploring new frontiers has always been a key driver of our pursuit for knowledge and I think it reflects intrinsic curiosity of us as a species,” says Associate Professor Michele Trenti from the University of Melbourne’s School of Physics. “Space today is the ultimate frontier for exploration... looking up at the night sky seeing stars, planets and wondering what is our place in the cosmos. “That’s the part that took me towards being today at the University of Melbourne studying the universe and how we can build small satellites to help us with that.” Professor Trenti is the lead investigator of the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal satellite or SpIRIT satellite – a joint project between the Australian Space Agency, Australian space industry companies and the Italian Space Agency. Dr Airlie Chapman is a senior lecturer in mechatronics from the Melbourne School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne and co-investigator on the project. “Austr

“You don’t know what health problems a population has unless you can measure them, and that’s what I try to do,” says Alan Lopez, Laureate Professor of Global Health at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. “If you’re going to improve a population’s health, then you need to know which are the leading causes of death, and particularly which ones are increasing so that you can match interventions to those health problems,” he says. Professor Lopez specialises in descriptive epidemiology, which looks at not the causes, but the measurement of disease and mortality patterns in populations. He says getting the measurement right on lung cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, measles, TB or road traffic accidents, matters a lot to health policy. “If you can demonstrate that death rates from a particular condition or disease are rising rapidly, or falling rapidly, then you’re either doing something wrong, or something right and policy can be calibrated according to that knowledge

Major depressive disorder is common and costly – one in seven Australians will experience depression in their lifetime. So understanding what’s going on in the brain and using that knowledge to identify new, faster-acting therapeutic strategies for treatment makes sense. “Our job is to record the electrical activity of nerve cells, the excitable cells in the brain, by way of eavesdropping on their function,” says Professor Scott Thompson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Physiology and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Our research is focused on the neurobiology of depression, what goes wrong in the brain when there is a case of depression and we would like to use that knowledge to offer up ideas for better, more effective, faster acting antidepressant drug treatments,” he says. While current antidepressants – that include SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) like Prozac – are effective in two thirds of patients, they typically require four to eig

“The work on conspiracy theories surprises me every day because I’m troubled by the general lack of trust in so many institutions – political and health institutions – that have been trusted for a long time,” says Dr Robin Canniford, Senior Lecturer in Management and Marketing in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. “As to why this is happening now, I would draw on the climate of fear that people are experiencing,” Dr Canniford says. “In addition to the fight or flight response that we know psychologically as a response to fear, I think one thing that humans tend to do is to make up stories to rationalise that which they afraid of and that which they can’t control.” But Dr Canniford adds that some of the questions raised by the public are fair and relevant. “If we take the United Kingdom as an example, the SAGE Committee –the group of scientists who were put together to advise on the response to COVID-19 – remained a closed shop. Now the questions then immediately come abou

“A lot of people think of an earthquake as a one-off example, but [the after shocks from the 2010-2012 Canterbury earthquake] went on for a year and a half,” says Mark Quigley, Associate Professor of Active Tectonics and Geomorphology in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. “At any time we could be sitting in our University or at home and just have this strong shaking come and just completely disrupt our world. Through all that, you had to try to keep your teaching curriculum going as best you could,” Professor Quigley says. “Those were the experiences I had in Christchurch, and they’re so analogous to what’s happening now on a whole bunch of levels.” Professor Quigley describes how people can use challenging times as an opportunity to stimulate new alternatives. “There will be opportunities here to better engage the underprivileged countries around the world with things like scientific conferences and meetings through virtual connections... that they never were able to afford thro

“I think it’s very likely we’ll get to good drugs even quicker than we’ll get to a good vaccine,” says Peter Doherty, Nobel Prize winner, University of Melbourne Laureate Professor, patron and namesake of the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. “What’s worked for HIV is what we call designer drugs,” Professor Doherty says. “Structural biologists design a chemical which will fit in to the really important part of that [virus] structure for binding to the cell, for instance. That would be a blocker, and that’s an effective drug.” In terms of what we need to do to prepare for a future pandemic caused by an unknown virus, Professor Doherty highlights the work of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “[CEPI] funded the research of Professor Paul Young and his group at the University of Queensland, who’ve developed the primary Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate. They developed a platform technology called the protein clamp. When this new virus came along, they were just able to

“Isolation is bad for a lot of people,” says Cathy Humphreys, Professor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. “It’s bad for people’s mental and physical health, it’s bad for domestic violence and child abuse,” she says. “But, of course, when you’ve got this extraordinarily virulent virus you don’t have too many choices [but to stay home to prevent its spread].” “In Western Australia for example, the most worrying aspect of the data we are seeing is a 30 per cent decline in the calls women have been making to the helpline, even though they are potentially experiencing a lot more violence,” she says. “But they haven’t got the opportunity to be able to seek help.” But she says there has been an international increase in the use of searching on websites and chat rooms to try and gain information. “There’s a lesson there about expanding the ways of being able to access women and their children at a time when you’ve got increased danger,” Professor Humphreys says. “Men have been reaching out to the me

“I think a unique thing about this COVID pandemic is it’s been a real triple whammy for a lot of people,” says Dr Grant Blashki who is a GP, Associate Professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne and lead clinical advisor at Beyond Blue. “People are obviously worried about their health, not getting the infection. Secondly, many have lost jobs or are under a lot of financial pressure at the moment. “Thirdly, their home life has been drastically transformed. For some people, it might be that they’re home on their own. For others, they might find suddenly they’re in a very busy household with partners and kids,” he says. Working with Beyond Blue, Dr Blashki has been encouraging people to be proactive about maintaining their mental wellbeing. “Sometimes we do just have to shut off, particularly if the media is getting too much,” he says. “Your mind isn’t designed to be on all the time, it actually gets exhausting.” “And routine is really useful. I recommend that people create

“Our profession began with infectious diseases,” says Professor Tony Blakely. “So, if I break it down and say epidemic and -ology, which equals study, we are the study of epidemics – epidemiology,” he says. “My day job is to model the effect of interventions on the population’s health. “Sometimes I look in the rear vision mirror of the car and sometimes I look out the front window and I actually forecast the future, under business as usual. Then I layer an intervention over that, like a tax on sugary drinks or a colorectal cancer screening program. “Then we estimate the health gains (from those interventions) and report back to our academic and policy end users on which interventions appear to have a big impact, versus a small impact, and which are cost effective.” Professor Blakely explains that this particular skillset also applies to modelling COVID-19 infection control and exit strategy models. “We have three exit strategies out of this COVID epidemic. One, we eliminate, we lock our borders and we h

One of the things about literature is that it always responds immediately to what’s happening in the environment, says Associate Professor Justin Clemens from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. “People started writing responses to the plague immediately, but the most famous book is probably Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which was written after the plague in Florence of 1348,” says Professor Clemens. The Decameron is a group of stories united by the overarching tale of a group of young aristocrats who have retreated to the hills to avoid the plague. “They didn’t have Zoom, they didn’t have the internet and so they tell each other stories over the course of two weeks,” Professor Clemens says. Dr Suzie Fraser adds that the Black Death, or the Bubonic Plague, was also depicted by visual artists using representations of death, pestilence and disaster. “One of the most prevalent visual allegories that emerged in the Middle Ages was the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death,” Dr

WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. The inspiration for the exhibition Flesh after Fifty came about as a result of Professor Martha Hickey’s work in the menopause service. “Women facing menopause at an early age would often say ‘I’m going to be an old woman’,” explains the professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Melbourne and Royal Women’s Hospital. “Those two words together were the worst thing in the world. Reflecting on myself and the women that I knew and the contribution of older women, I really wanted to change that message.” Lead curator of the exhibition Jane Scott describes the dilemma and also the delight of this exhibition was attempting to photograph 500 women over the age of 50 in the nude. “Most of the women would comment and talk about the fact that they were unhappy in their own skin,” she says. “But once they got that off their chest, they started to talk about how proud they were of their bodies for carrying them around, for delivering them the ability to have the life that they

“I challenge you, nothing is more fascinating, nothing is more puzzling than our brain,” says Professor Tracy Bale from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA and the Director of the Centre for Epigenetic Research in Child Health and Brain Development. Professor Bale studies epigenetics – biochemical marks on our DNA. “It doesn’t change the DNA sequence, we still inherit that from mum and dad. It is the environment’s way of allowing specific genes to be expressed or not expressed during given times or in specific tissues.” Epigenetics can have an intergenerational and even potentially a trans-generational effect on how offspring may develop, she says. “This is based on different environmental exposures – Mum was obese, Dad was stressed – or enrichment such as your parents may have read to you more or less. “Our brain continues to respond to its environment. So all of these factors together determine exactly how we function in our risk and our resilience.” Professor Bale notes that ADHD (Attention deficit