Griffith University continues to cement its place at the forefront of the financial planning sector, with three students taking out the major categories at the 2016 FPA Awards.
Masters student Cody Harmon was named the FPA Financial Planner of the Year, undergraduate Bradley Aleckson was crowned University Student of the Year, and Griffith Business School alumnus Cynthia Sercombe was announced as Paraplanner of the Year.
The victory is particularly sweet for Tupicoffs paraplanner Cynthia, as it’s the first time the awards have recognised paraplanning as its own profession in the awards. “As a paraplanner you just learn to accept that you’re not going to be rewarded, it’s the financial planner that wins awards usually,” she explains. “So it was just really nice to be able to have some recognition for the back office work that gets done. And I was stoked to hear that I won!”
She says one thing
Category: Griffith University Feed
‘Just listen…!’: employee voice, Bundaberg Hospital & robo-debt recovery
In 2005, Bundaberg Base Hospital (BBH) made world news after Surgeon Jayant Patel was arrested over the deaths of patients on whom he operated as Director of Surgery at the Hospital. Patel was alleged to have caused at least 18 deaths through negligence. While medical staff making mistakes is not a new phenomena this was a rare case where employees attempted to voice concerns but a substantial system failure led to very public and extended legal proceedings that laid bare processes normally dealt with ‘in house’.
Giving staff a say in what happens in their workplace in the hope that it will influence their employer’s operations and business affairs for the better is what employers want. Equally, employees wish to put forward views both for this reason as well as asserting their own interests. These are both what researchers refer to as ‘employee voice’.
The assumption cannot be made however, that formalised
Innovative workshop aims to foster research with lasting impact
As the government begins to put more focus on research impact when it comes to funding, it’s important that universities can demonstrate the ways in which their work can be more meaningful beyond the pages of journals.
With this in mind, Griffith Business School joined forces with the Department of International Business and Asian Studies, and the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing to present a workshop geared at discovering how to create research with impact.
Professor Paul Hibbert, University of St Andrews
Featuring speakers such as , Vice Principal of the University of Dundee; Griffith University’s Associate Professor Tim Butcher, from the Department of International Business and Asian Studies; and Professor Paul Hibbert, the Dean of Arts and Divinity at University of St Andrews, the workshop aimed to explore how to create and communicate the meaningful outcomes of Griffith University’s research in a ways that resonate with and impact the economy,
The remarkable scientist making new life connections
Alan Mackay-Sim is a world-renowned trailblazer in cell transplantation, paving the way for innovative research on repairing damaged spinal cords to return the gift of movement to paralysed people.
The Professor Emeritus from Griffith University is now 2017 Queensland Australian of the Year and a nominee for the national honour. More importantly, he’s a man with an unquenchable desire to make a difference and change lives.
In 2014 when paraplegic Darek Fidyk stood upright and tentatively put one foot in front of the other, the world was captivated. An astonishing achievement of science was hailed by experts as being “more impressive than man walking on the moon”. Four years earlier, Darek had been paralysed from the chest down after having his spinal cord completely severed in a knife attack.
The Polish firefighter may have been operated on by specialists in Europe but the heart of this amazing story began in Brisbane with this
Meet the Queensland Reds player kicking study goals for a successful future
Professional sportspeople have a narrow window of opportunity to excel in their chosen field while they’re at peak fitness. But when that window closes, they need to have a plan for a second career. And that’s exactly what Queensland Reds player Caleb Timu is counting on.
Caleb grew up watching rugby every weekend and knew without doubt that he wanted to play sport professionally. But he also always wanted to study, to ensure his career after sport was as successful as his time on the field.
Now, the Griffith University student is enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce, and is determined to get a quality education and set an example for his family.
“I was the first one to graduate from high school out of my parents and siblings,” he explains. “I’ve always seen education as an important pathway for me in the future as I knew that rugby wouldn’t last forever.”
Caleb made
Griffith University response to media reports
A small number of media reports have incorrectly claimed Australian of the Year and Professor Alan Mackay-Sim was directly involved in the surgery that enabled a previously paralysed man to regain use of his legs.
That surgery was conducted by Dr Pawel Tabakow in Poland in 2014.
The work of Dr Pawel Tabakow is to be applauded as a very significant advancement in spinal cord injury repair. His colleague Professor Geoffrey Raisman was the first to use olfactory ensheathing cell transplantation for spinal cord injury repair in animals. Professor Mackay-Sim continues to acknowledge their contributions.
It is without dispute that Professor Alan Mackay-Sim’s research and clinical trials between 2002 and 2008 paved the way for the ongoing work being done today in the study and development of stem cell transplantation.
Human clinical trials are critical milestones in research development for which Professor Mackay-Sim is acknowledged as leading by the worldwide scientific community. Dr Tabakow
Vice Chancellor congratulates Australia Day honours recipients
Griffith University Vice Chancellor and President Professor Ian O’Connor has congratulated Professor Emeritus Alan Mackay-Sim on being named the 2017 Australian of the Year.
The announcement was made by Prime Minister, The Honourable Malcom Turnbull MP, at a gala ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra on 25 January.
“Griffith University is extremely proud to have such a remarkable man and scientist among us,” Professor O’Connor said.
As the former Director of the National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research, and Professor Emeritus at the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, Alan has spent his career looking at the regenerative properties of stem cells and how these can be used to repair damaged spinal cords.
His research has laid the foundation for global efforts in what is truly an extraordinary field.
Professor O’Connor also offered his warm congratulations to other members of the Griffith community awarded Australia Day honours.
Bill Lovegrove
Professor Bill Lovegrove, former Deputy Vice Chancellor at Griffith
Researcher helps disaster planning in Mongolia
While Queensland sweltered in a heat wave, Griffith University disaster expert Dr Hamish McLean tackled minus 30 degree temperatures in remote Mongolia to help the country’s health services.
Dr McLean, a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, joined Mongolian medics near the frozen Siberian border to see first-hand how the country was dealing with a declared winter disaster.
“The winter is particularly harsh this year which means local communities, and their livestock, can face extremely difficult freezing conditions – the reverse of Australia,” he said.
“While ambulance services in Australia were warning about dehydration, their counterparts in Mongolia were dealing with frostbite and hypothermia.”
Near the Siberian border, Dr McLean joined specialist medical teams transported to the ger (tent) homes of several nomadic families by old Russian ambulances (pictured below).
“Providing in-home specialist medical care helped overcome the lack of resources to get people in rural areas into hospitals,” he
Leave Year 1 testing to the teachers
Testing students isn’t always the answer for improvement according to Griffith University education lecturer Dr Georgina Barton.
Commenting on the Federal Government’s call for Year 1’s to be tested on their literacy skills, Dr Barton says teachers know what makes a good reader and “we should trust their professional judgement”.
“Firstly, there’s a huge body of evidence that highlights the benefits of play-based and imaginative approaches to learning for young students,’’ she said.
“Students of this age will be at quite diverse stages of development. For example, six months difference in age can result in children being at extreme levels of readiness and/or reading levels. It’s sometimes like comparing apples with oranges.”
She said children are already being over-tested in schools purely for accountability purposes so a lot of data is already being collected.
“But it’s not always the right data and sometimes it’s just the same type of test over and over.”
Reading development
“Reading involves
Quantum RAM: modelling the big questions with the very small
When it comes to studying transportation systems, stock markets and the weather, quantum mechanics is probably the last thing to come to mind.
However, scientists at Australia’s Griffith University and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University have just performed a ‘proof of principle’ experiment showing that when it comes to simulating such complex processes in the macroscopic world quantum mechanics can provide an unexpected advantage.
Griffith’s Professor Geoff Pryde, who led the project, says that such processes could be simulated using a “quantum hard drive”, much smaller than the memory required for conventional simulations.
“Stephen Hawking once stated that the 21st century is the ‘century of complexity’, as many of today’s most pressing problems, such as understanding climate change or designing transportation system, involve huge networks of interacting components,” he says.
“Their simulation is thus immensely challenging, requiring storage of unprecedented amounts of data. What our experiments demonstrate is a solution may come from quantum theory,