News Archive

Supplied by Elizabeth Hutchinson Executive Officer, Academic Promotions Committee  Human Resources

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Research Associate Professor  Deirdre Gleeson (School of Earth and Environment)

Dr Gleeson joined the University in 2005.   Prior to commencing her employment at UWA, she completed four years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Dublin, Ireland.  This included a prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology which she held until 2005 and it was during this time that she spent some months as a Visiting Fellow at UWA.

Dr Gleeson's international research standing is recognised via international collaboration with authors from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Canada and the USA.  She is an Associate Editor for two international journals (Fungal Biology, and Frontiers in Terrestrial Microbiology).  In addition, she is a reviewer for several top journals in the field as well as for the Australian Research Council and National Science Foundation (USA) funding schemes. Her research is funded by a wide variety of organisations including the Australian Research Council, the Department of Agriculture and the Grains Research and Development Corporation.

In spite of her research intensive status, Dr Gleeson is very committed to teaching at UWA. She currently teaches in soil science and will be heavily involved in the new UWA Masters in Biotechnology which commences in 2015.  She was also involved in the establishment of Australia's first Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) during 2014, at the UWA Future Farm in Pingelly, Western Australia.  As part of this initiative she ran a workshop at UWA in April of this year, and will be involved in a Summer School for PhD students in February 2015 which it is hoped will become an annual event.

Research Associate Professor Hilary Wallace (Burns Injury Research Unit, School of Surgery )

Dr Wallace joined the University as a Research Officer at Fremantle Hospital in March 1995.  Her current research interests are in international health - interdisciplinary approach to burns prevention in low and middle income countries, integrative genomics of scarring, scar outcome after burn injury, Keloid scarring, and clinical research.  At the Australia and New Zealand Burns Association Annual Scientific Meeting in 2013, she received the People's Choice Award.  In 2012 she received an Australian Endeavour Fellowship from the Australian Government which led  to a three month visit to Nepal.  She is currently a member of the International Society for Burn Injuries Subcommittee on Burn Data.  She is a member of several professional associations and is a registered veterinary surgeon in Western Australia.

Dr Wallace's research output is of high quality and has made significant impacts in understanding the biological mechanisms of wound healing and in the area of clinical research.  Her current projects are large scale and extend across a wide area of research.  She has been successful in generating collaborations within UWA, Australia and internationally.  It is recognised that Dr Wallace's research will continue to have an impact in changes to clinical burns and wound healing practice.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Associate Professor Tinka Sack (School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts)

Associate Professor Sack joined the University in 1998.  She is currently collaborating with colleagues at The University of Melbourne, RMIT, The University of Adelaide, and Lincoln University in developing a Shared Masters program as a result of a successful Australian Government Department of Teaching Seed grant.  The intent of the program being to take advantage of the distinct strengths of each of the partnering institutions while offering increased mobility in postgraduate education.  It is hoped the program will also help to increase the profile of the profession of landscape architecture and provide long term collaborative networks between students and academic staff.

Her research involves her practice as a landscape architect in both original and creative work as well as increasingly traditional academic scholarship.  Her most significant built work, The University of Sydney (Camperdown) campus originated as a submission to an international competition in 2003.  The campus was completed in 2009 and received several professional awards in urban design and landscape architecture.  Associate Professor Sack has also been involved in community design both in teaching and research. The Dunsborough Foreshore project included heritage planning, community design, the re-built foreshore and Seymour Park.

PROFESSOR

Professor Nigel Westbrook (School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts)

Associate Professor Westbrook joined the University in 1993.  Since his last promotion in 2002 he has established a reputation as a respected researcher within the field of Architectural History and Late Antique and Early Byzantine studies, as reflected in his publication record.  For an extended period of five years he has acted in the position of Discipline Chair of Architecture and other associated leadership roles.  His research is focused on the architectural reconstruction of the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors and the topography of the Early Byzantine city of Constantinople up to the early 7th century. He has collaborated on research projects with scholars from other Australian universities as well as international scholars from Reading, Prague, Ankara, Istanbul and Curtin, here in WA.  In 2009 and 2013 he was a Visiting Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens where he completed final revisions of his PhD manuscript and led a design studio with others from the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens in a teaching and research nexus.

His PhD research formed the basis for an encyclopaedia entry in the Greek on-line version The Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World and this led to his being accepted for residencies in the American School in Athens and the DAI Istanbul where he has been invited to take part in a publication and exhibition in 2015 on the subject of the life and work of the Swiss archaeologist Ernest Mamboury.

WINTHROP PROFESSOR

Winthrop Professor Philip Vercoe (School of Animal Biology)

Professor Vercoe joined the University in 1995.  The main research focus of the work undertaken in his laboratory is on nutritional, genetic and management approaches to reducing methane emissions from ruminants and the role of the microorganisms in the rumen in developing clean, green and ethical livestock production systems.

He has enjoyed ongoing international links to the EU Framework projects. In 2006, he was on secondment to the International Atomic Energy Agency.  He is and has been involved in the Global Research Alliance for reducing methane emissions from livestock, via workshops held in New Zealand.  The intention of this alliance being to get research activities related to reducing emissions from livestock coordinated across international boundaries with a view to sharing data and building capacity in developing countries.

The culmination of these activities has been the development of The Rumen Pangenome Project to examine the link between the host animal's genome and the microbial genome in the rumen and to understand the degree to which the host animal controls methane emissions and feed efficiency in ruminants.

He was involved in the establishment of INGA (International Network and Genetics in Aquaculture).  This is part of the World Fish Centre and was established to provide a global forum for collaborative research and training in applied fish breeding and genetics. Professor Vercoe was also involved as a facilitator of a Clean Green and Ethical workshop in Thailand held in Bangkok in 2007.

He contributes to teaching and learning by coordinating  units within the Faculty of Science at all levels.  He is in high demand as a supervisor of  Honours/4 ^th year projects (over 60 since 2005).  He was awarded an Improving Student Learning grant during 2012-2013 to develop the UWA 2050 Future Farm as a teaching tool and this is proving to be a huge success.