The Queensland College of Art (QCA) will open its doors to the public for a special five-day event from 26-30 November.
Theannual QCAShowcase will transform the South Bank campus into a host of exhibition spaces, featuring the work of graduating students from Fine Art; Film; Animation; Games Design; Photography; Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art; and Design.
According to recently appointed Director of the QCA, Professor Derrick Cherrie, the event is an incredible opportunity for the community to see firsthand the talent being nurtured in their hometown.
“The QCA is Australia’s oldest and one of the country’s largest art academies and has produced some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists including Michael Zavros, Victoria Reichelt, Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Abbey McCulloch and Gordon Bennett,” he says.
“The showcase is also an ideal way to see the many diverse and exciting art forms the QCA has on offer and the extraordinary work being made here.
“We have a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, fine art, jewellery and small objects, printmaking, sculpture, animation, film, design futures — absolutely everything on show, all together, and in the one location, bringing together more than 200 graduating students and over 1,000 works!”
Alana Townsend, QCA Bachelor of Photography (Creative Advertising)
Events across theQCAShowcase are set to include a grand opening ceremony, industry previews, student awards, creative panel discussions, food and drink stalls, music from the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith Film School screenings, exhibition displays, framing workshops and more.
Showing at Griffith University Art Gallery will beBrutal Truths:Vernon Ah Kee,Gordon Bennett,Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, whichpresents preeminent voices in contemporary Australian art, each with substantial international profiles. Two of the included artists are QCA Alumni — Vernon Ah Kee and the late Gordon Bennett (awarded Griffith University’s Alumnus of the Year 2014).Exhibition dates: 19 November 2015 — 9 April 2016.
Opening Event:4pm — 9pm, Thursday 26 November
Queensland College of Art,226 Grey Street, South Bank.
RUNS: Thursday 26 November through to Monday 30 November, 2015.
Drawing on his experience as a foreign correspondent and prisoner on terrorism charges in Egypt, he will examine the relationship between journalism and government in a post 9/11 world.
He concludes that in seeking to make ourselves safer, we may in fact be destabilising the very system that has made us among the most prosperous, stable and secure democracies in the world.
Mr Greste continues to campaign for freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the hundreds of journalists currently held in detention around the world. He is a state finalist in the 2016 Australian of the Year Awards.
Please Note:The Griffith Lecture is now fully booked
The value of research for clinical practice was the focus of discussion as part of the 10 year anniversary celebration of Griffith University’s School of Medicine.
The cocktail event, on Monday 23 November, saw clinicians, academics and current and past medicine students come together to celebrate the successes of the School over the past decade.
The event was also attended by Mr Mick de Brenni MP, Chief Government Whip and Member for Springwood, Pro Vice Chancellor Health Professor Allan Cripps and Professor John Prins, director of the Mater Research Institute.
Dean of Medicine, Professor Simon Broadley said the event was a chance to celebrate the great Medicine program at the university and its reaccreditation by the Australian Medical Council (AMC) earlier this year.
The AMC stated that the program’s curriculum is comprehensive and well-integrated, with assessment practices that are thorough and well blueprinted. It also highlighted the outstanding co-located academic and clinical facilities at the Gold Coast campus and Gold Coast University Hospital, and the collaborative arrangements with co-located medical schools.
“We are pleased to say that the Griffith Medicine School is one of the top performing schools in Australia and one which boasts great integration with our public health system,” said Professor Broadley.
Significant funding
“It has also achieved highly significant external funding achievements and a high degree of published papers with its research activity. These are aspects of the School that I am extremely proud of.”
Griffith Medicine alumni of 2011 and Australasian Young Doctor of the Year 2015, Dr Katherine Goodall was one of the guests at the event.
“In the four years I have been practicing medicine I believe that Griffith taught me more than how to do my job,” she said.
“I am now a surgical trainee and working on becoming a general surgeon. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I take pride in teaching others and mentoring those junior to me and thrive on the enthusiasm of others. I was recognised for my efforts in doing what I love and believe this came from the opportunities Griffith offered me early on.
“It has been wonderful to see where graduates have ended up and even more wonderful to keep running into them along my own adventure. I’ve seen Griffith grow from the “old” building at GH1 to the amazing facilities they offer now with up to date teaching approaches and supportive staff who obviously enjoy what they do.
“Thank you Griffith, congratulations and I am only too proud to share this celebration.”
Iranian-born artist Sara Irannejad presents works across painting, pyrography, installation and video for A thousand interconnections.
The Doctor of Visual Art candidate at Queensland College of Art is exploring diasporic identity and mythology, with visual elements informed by Persian culture and personal experiences.
Juxtaposed with elements of Australian flora and historical artefacts, these works create a bridge of dialogue between her own life and a broader cultural awareness, highlighting the present and past, the traditional and contemporary and the local and introduced.
Sara says she left her home country of Iran in 2010, “in order to get away from the autocracy and censorship that has limited the art practitioners”.
She studied a Master of Studio Art at Boston’s School of Museum of Fine Art and in 2011 was granted anExceptional Artist scholarshipaward from this school.
In 2012, she chose Australia as her new home and has been living in Brisbane as a practicing visual artist and designer since then.
Her works offer new perspectives on identity by linking between profound aspects of Iranian culture and current conflicts in multicultural Australia.
A thousand interconnections 10 — 20 December, 2015
Official Opening: 6-8pm, Thursday 10 December
Pop Gallery, 27 Logan Road, Woolloongabba
Participants in the School of Environment’s Conservation in Practice Thailand course enjoyed a tigerish treat at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast this week, meeting the theme park’s newest tiger cub, Kai.
Mr Al Mucci, Dreamworld’s General Manager Life Sciences and the Dreamworld Wildlife Foundation, invited students and staff to attend a tailored educational interaction session to learn about Dreamworld’s conservation programs.
This included getting up close and personal with Kai, and hearing a talk by Tiger Island Manager, Mr Patrick Martin-Vengue, who has worked with tigers for more than 35 years.
“We are proud to be a partner with Griffith University’s Conservation in Practice course,” said Mr Mucci.
Students meet Dreamworld’s newest tiger cub, Kai
“Dreamworld is passionate and committed to saving the remaining 3,000 tigers left in the wild and supports conservation funds including 21st Century Tiger, the Phoenix Fund and Fauna & Flora International.
“Since 2006, we have donated more than $2 million to saving tigers in the wild, making Dreamworld the biggest zoological contributor to 21st Century Tiger.
“Dreamworld and Griffith University also have a long research history together through the Dreamworld Wildlife Foundation.”
Next week, students will join the World Wildlife Fund’s tiger monitoring program in Thailand’s Kui Buri National Park. The visit will include camera trapping and monitoring tigers in the wild.
Convened by Professor Jean-Marc Hero, Conservation in Practice is an award-winning course within Griffith’s Global Mobility program.
The course allows students to enhance their degrees through global work-integrated learning, immersing them in real life field research and experience in “conservation in practice”.
Through field visits, lectures, case studies, guest lecturers and, for the Thailand group, even a visit to the Australian Ambassador’s Residence in Bangkok, students gain an appreciation of the practicalities of conservation and how local communities, management agencies, research institutes, global NGOs, private industry and governments work together to achieve conservation outcomes on a global scale.
Thailand is one of 48 countries offering opportunities to Griffith students and Dreamworld provides in-kind support for the course in Thailand.
A group of first-year Griffith University environmental engineering students enjoyed a successful debut in the Chem-E-Car competition at the recent Asia Pacific Confederation of Chemical Engineering in Melbourne.
The competition challenges students’ ability to design and build a car that uses a chemical reaction, or reactions, to power it and control the distance it travels carrying a specified load.
The goal is to have your car stop closest to a specified finish line, thus demonstrating the ability to control a chemical reaction.
The effectiveness of the car is strongly dependent on its mechanical robustness, so success relies on more than theory alone.
Griffith’s team — Matthew Watson, Will Stockdale, Claudia Smith, Robin Klein, Bryce Davies, Brock Marron, Yudhish Bhinkah and Omer Khan — came up with a carbon/aluminium-based electrochemical reaction to drive the car. They used a screw-free fabrication design.
Faced with strong competition from the Asia Pacific region that featured mainly fourth year chemical engineering students, Griffith performed creditably to finish eighth out of the 15 teams.
“Chem-E-Car is a fun, interactive and open-ended learning experience for students,” says Dr Li.
“The competition is about working as a team to design a complex chemical process reaction to a tight schedule with a fixed budget.
“It also tests the ability to design a working chemical reactor that must operate under real conditions, and requires contestants to be flexible and fast thinking.
“This is one of the initiatives of the School of Engineering’s Experiential Learning implementation and, for our first time in the competition, the Griffith team can be very proud of its performance.”
The 2015 Pro Vice Chancellor’s Griffith Sciences Excellence Awards were presented this week and celebrated a year of outstanding achievement.
Pro Vice Chancellor Professor Debra Henly said performances across areas such as student learning, research, sustainability, support services and health and safety had contributed significantly to the rise of Griffith University through the world university rankings, and to the University’s reputation as a provider of distinctive and quality higher education.
“Griffith Sciences’ fields of education discipline areas are now ranked in the top 10 nationally for ‘overall satisfaction’ and ranked in the top 15 nationally for ‘good teaching’ in the Course Evaluation Questionnaire,” said Professor Henly.
“Additionally, there has been a significant increase in the Learning & Teaching measures from the University Experience Survey in all of our fields of education discipline areas.”
Early Career Researcher Award
Winner: Dr Xiaobo Qu (Engineering, Urban Research Program)
Highly Commended: Dr Dung Phung (Centre for Environment and Population Health)
Mid-Career Researcher Award
Associate Professor Shanqing Zhang (Centre for Environment and Energy, Environmental Futures Research Institute)
Research Leadership Award
Professor Ron Quinn (Eskitis Institute for Drug Discovery)
Professor Henley and Professor Catherine Pickering
Research Supervision Award
Professor Catherine Pickering (Environmental Futures Research Institute)
Excellence of a Research Group Award
Griffith Transport Research, Urban Research Program, featuring Associate Professor Matthew Burke, Dr Tooran Alizadeh, Professor Lex Brown, Dr Jenny Cui, Associate Professor Gui Lohmann, Dr Xiaobo Qu, Professor Tim Ryley, Professor Peter Tatham; Dr Kieran Tranter, Dr Barbara Yen, Dr Yong Wu
Professor Tony Hall, Mr Bruce James, Dr Wisinee Wisetjindawat and Dr Wen-Chun Tseng are acknowledged as Adjunct members or Visiting Fellows who have contributed to the success of the team
Griffith Sciences staff who contributed to publications in journals of Nature and Science (HERDC Eligible)
Dr Sankar Subramanian and Professor David Lambert for “Whole-genome analyses resolve early branches in the tree life of modern birds” – Science
Dr Michael Westaway and Professor David Lambert for “Genomic structure in Europeans dating back at least 36,200 years” — Science
Professor Vicky Avery for “A novel multiple-stage antimalarial agent that inhibits protein synthesis” — Nature
Dr Adam Brumm for “Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia” – Nature
Griffith Sciences Learning and Teaching Citations
Winners: Dr Yong Zhu (Engineering); Dr Alison White (Natural Sciences); Dr Amir Etemad-Shahidi and Dr Xiaobo Qu (Engineering); Dr Christopher Love (Natural Sciences)
Highly Commended: Dr Leigh-Ellen Potter (Information and Communication Technology); Dr Saeed Shaeri (Engineering)
Ms Sarah-Jane Gregory accepts her Excellence in Teaching award from Professor Henly
Griffith Awards for Excellence in Teaching (Griffith Sciences)
Winner: Ms Sarah-Jane Gregory (Natural Sciences)
Highly Commended (Early Career): Dr Christopher Love (Natural Sciences)
Griffith Award for Excellence in Teaching
Early career
Dr Ivan Gratchev (Engineering)
Sessional Academic
Ms Claire Hoffman (Environment)
Innovation in Learning Design
Dr Leigh Ellen Potter (ICT)
Leadership of Learning and Teaching
Highly Commended: Associate Professor Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy (ICT)
Associate Professor Eddo Coiacetto accepts his award
Griffith Sciences Grants for Learning and Teaching
Associate Professor Eddo Coiacetto (Environment); Dr Aysin Dedekorkut (Environment); Dr Ruwan Fernando (Environment); Dr Ruben Gonzalez (ICT); Associate Professor Peter Johnston (Natural Sciences); Dr Anisur Rahman (Engineering); Dr Larry Wen (ICT)
Professional Staff Excellence Award
Ms Peta Leahy (Griffith Centre for Coastal Management)
Professional Staff Team Excellence Award
Griffith School of Environment Technical Team (Gold Coast): Ryan Stewart, Jeremy Carrington, Simon Kerville, Alan Richards and Dr David Camp
Health & Safety Initiative
Associate Professor Kathryn Tonissen, Associate Professor Chris Brown, Alan White and Chris Merrit (Natural Sciences)
Health & Safety Leadership
Joint winners: Dr Carie-Anne Logue (Glycomics) and Ms Carolyn Polson (Australian Rivers Institute)
Sustainability Team Excellence Award
Dr Jo-Anne Ferreira and Ms Vicki Keliher (Environment)
The following article was written for the Federal Government’s Australia Awards, which bring together scholarships and fellowships administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Education and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. The author is dual Australia Awards scholar and environmental engineer, Ms Ni Made Utami Dwipayanti, who is studying a PhD at Griffith University’s Centre for Population and Environmental Health.
In most situations and places, toilets and defecation are taboo topics for discussion. They are at the bottom of the list of topics for dinner table conversations.
Yet 2.4 billion people have no access to toilets in developing countries.
In Indonesia, a country with rapid economic development, it is unacceptable that nearly half the population has no access to a toilet and practises open defecation.
My interest in sanitation and waste management began when I was doing my Bachelor’s Degree in the Environmental Engineering Department at the Institute of Technology Bandung (Indonesia).
Then, after completing a Masters in the Sustainable Development Program of the Built Environment Faculty at the University of New South Wales, I began teaching in the School of Public Health at Udayana University in Bali.
The exposure to public health issues through this new job was my first direct experience of the actual situation in the community. As an engineer, I am very well trained in sanitation technology, from the simplest type to the most advanced.
However, I found that inspite of the country’s rapid modernisation, even something as simple as a basic toilet has not been adopted in rural areas as quickly as other technologies such as television or mobile phones.
Participating in the national program of Community Based Total Sanitation since 2010, and in the Provincial Working Group of Drinking Water and Sanitation in Bali, I realised that encouraging people to use the technologies is even more complex than designing the technology.
It is a multi-dimensional and multi-level issue. The complexity is even greater when we realise that it is not just using the toilet, but ensuring that the waste is safely disposed of.
I am very grateful to receive, for the second time, an Australia Award. My PhD studies at Griffith University in Queensland are focused on conducting research into the determinants of toilet adoption and sustainability in rural areas.
Griffith University’s Centre for Population and Environmental Health has international experience in studying complex issues in public and environmental health, particularly in developing countries.
The Centre has been assisting me to comprehensively understand the determinants of toilet adoption and sustainability in rural areas by integrating individual, cultural, structural, environment and service factors within one framework.
Hopefully the findings from my study and the framework I have used may facilitate communication and collaboration among stakeholders in the sanitation sector, in order to systematically and comprehensively understand and address the issues of sanitation access and sustainability.
I hope I can make a small contribution to the world effort to end open defecation and to provide access to basic toilets for all by 2030.
The far-reaching effects of violence in the home wasconsidered at a Brisbane forum on Wednesday, November 25.
The Honourable Shannon Fentiman MP, Minister for Communities, Women and Youth, Minister for Child Safety and Minister for Multicultural Affairs openedthe Griffith University Equity Symposium at the Sir Samuel Griffith Building, Nathan campus.
The symposium highlightedthe broad impacts of domestic violence. Featuring a panel of speakers, it provided a range of perspectives on issues including health, social, criminology/law, economic and Indigenous.
Professor Lesley Chenoweth, Pro Vice Chancellor Logan Campus, said one in five Australian women and one in 20 Australian men had experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner or parent.
“All sides of government, industry and the community at large now recognise the significant economic and social cost of this activity. It is a moral imperative that we address this as a whole community and universities have an important role to play ’’ she said.
“It is fitting that the Griffith Equity Symposium is held during the White Ribbon campaign, a campaign to stop violence against women that starts on 25 November and continues to 6 December.
“Griffith University has already made considerable contributions to addressing domestic violence through its teaching and research and we hope that events such as this provide a way forward to eliminating violence against women.”
Speakers:
Dr Kathleen Baird, Director of Midwifery and Nursing Education: Dr Baird is committed to providing women-centred care in pregnancy. Her research focuses on women’s experiences of domestic violence during pregnancy.
Zoe Rathus is Director of the Legal Clinic which allows students to work with community organisations that offer legal advice to disadvantaged people. In 2011 Zoe was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to family law and the rights of women and children.
Professor Patrick O’Leary, School of Human Services and Social WorkPatrick O’Leary has a distinguished research career in child protection, domestic violence and social work. He has undertaken research in the Middle East and Asia and specialised in child protection in Islamic countries.
Chris Fleming is an applied micro-economist with teaching, consulting and public policy experience. In 2015, he was appointed as MBA Director in the Griffith Business School.
Magistrate Zachery Sarra
Zachary Sarra is an Indigenous magistrate at the Wynnum Court House and a strong advocate of raising domestic violence awareness within the community.
While public conversation over refugees has devolved over the years, a visiting academic from the University of Michigan Professor James Hathaway argues that the tone of the conversation can be changed.
Professor Hathaway, who outlined an alternative model for international refugee law at a recent Griffith Law School public lecture, noted the solidarity marches and initiatives from ordinary citizens proves that there is a groundswell of compassion and concern for the plight of refugees.
“If you were forced to flee tomorrow, you would expect that some other person would show a little human empathy and see in you, what they see in themselves,” he said.
This capacity for empathy and understanding drives many people to reach out and make refugees feel welcome. Professor Hathaway uses the example of 11,000 Icelanders who have offered up their homes to refugees as ‘emblematic of something positive’.
For Australians looking to change the conversation on refugees, the examples being set in Europe should encourage them to make their voices heard.
“We’ve lived in Australia for a long time with a lot of negativity, but we can take a page from what’s happened in Germany and other leading European states where the person in the street has been very vocal,” he says.
Professor Hathaway says that these examples show that public opinion is not fixed and is ‘extraordinarily changeable’.
“I think sometimes people have been led to believe things that in their hearts they understand truly aren’t correct,” he says.
But in order for Governments to feel confident in embracing that shift in public sentiment, the global regime for dealing with refugees needs to be reinvigorated to be more workable for the long haul says Professor Hathaway.
