Category: Griffith University Feed

I

Emeritus Professor Alan Mackay-Sim has been honoured as this year’s Australian of the Year recipient.
The retired biomedical scientist accepted the prestigious award during a live announcement at Parliament House in Canberra on Australia Day eve.
Professor Mackay-Sim’s ‘personal object’ on display at the Australian National Museum in an exhibition for the Australian of the Year awards.
Professor Mackay-Sim has spent his career researching how nerve cells in the nose regenerate and pioneered a way to safely apply that same regenerative process to damaged spinal cords.
Recognised as the 2003 Queenslander of the Year and the 2017 Queensland Australian of the Year, Professor Mackay-Sim will now spend the next year fulfilling his duties for the Australian title while still overseeing several research projects at the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery.
Those projects include stem cell research into treatments for conditions such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to

See Full Post >>

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

See Full Post >>

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

See Full Post >>

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,

See Full Post >>

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

See Full Post >>

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

See Full Post >>

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,

See Full Post >>

Opposition from New Zealand, Fiji, England, Ireland and Brazil will keep Griffith graduate Shannon Parry on her toes this weekend at the HSBC Sydney Sevens.
And more top class rugby sevens competition on home soil awaits the Rio gold medallist later in 2017 with the inaugural National University Sevens Series announced yesterday by the ARU.
“The more high-grade competitions we have up and running, the more our national team will be kept in good stead going forward,” the Pearls star said.
“More importantly, the universities competition will open up pathways for grassroots rugby and give young women the chance to play a sport that is still generally male-dominated.”
Griffith University is one of eight teams named by the Australian Rugby Union to compete in the National University Sevens Series. Teams from NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and ACT will compete with three Queensland teams.
Director of Griffith Sports College, Duncan Free OAM (pictured), welcomed the announcement following

See Full Post >>

For soon-to-be Griffith engineering student, Kiarna Broomhead, the decision was easy.
On receiving an early offer to study at Griffith School of Engineering, the 17-year-old instantly called her dad who reminded her it was exactly the result for which she had hoped. She accepted in an instant and immediately breathed a sigh of relief and looked to the future.
The decision was made all the easier by older sisters, Anita and Jessie, who had already forged a family path to Griffith to study digital media and accounting and finance respectively. Kiarna is now forging her own pathway.
Throughout Year 12 and for much of Year 11 she had considered and reconsidered her options, with science-based and mathematics-based degrees attracting her attention. Ultimately, a career in biomedical engineering called, prompting her to choose a Bachelor of Engineering at Griffith as her first step.
Innovation calling
“I didn’t necessarily want to become a doctor or a surgeon but

See Full Post >>

Growing up in the southern Queensland town of Goondiwindi – population around 6000 – Toni Clarence knows how daunting it can be to relocate from the country to the big city.
That’s why sixteen soon-to-be Year 12 students from Goondiwindi State High School were in good hands recently when they spent a week visiting the Gold Coast and Brisbane to gain invaluable insight into life at Griffith University.
Toni spent her childhood in Goondiwindi before moving to the Gold Coast to study a Bachelor of Teaching at Griffith.
Having also completed a Bachelor of Education at the University and then teaching at various Queensland state schools, she returned to Goondiwindi in 1998 and later completed a Masters in Guidance and Counselling.
As Goondiwindi SHS’s Guidance Officer, Toni was the ideal choice to bring the excited students from the country to the coast.
“I remember how daunting it was when I left Goondiwindi to come to

See Full Post >>