Message from the Chief Executive

From the Chief Executive

I am delighted to contribute to the Alumni newsletter and AxON community keeping you informed of the wonderful achievements of our people as well as news on the performance and impact of our science. I very much appreciate the efforts of the Alumni reminding the community of the excellent science and positive impact of the work of all our teams at CSIRO.

CSIRO has recently entered into an agreement with GE Healthcare in which GE will provide $2M in funding to obtain blood samples and associated clinical data from Preventative Health's AIBL Study, and use these to validate its established biomarker research into Alzheimer's disease.

Our Future Manufacturing Flagship has partnered with Textor Technologies to carry out a four year, $6.4M project aimed at establishing a state-of-the art nano-fibre production and processing facility in Australia, and in December last year, the CSIRO-Nuctech Joint venture for CSIRO's Air Cargo Scanner Technology signed the first two sales with a total value of approximately $11M.

The Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA), a joint venture between CSIRO and the Queensland University of Technology, won the award for the best example of research and development collaboration in Australia from Business-Higher Education Round Table (B-HERT).

We're also excited that a contract for the design and build of the new marine research vessel the RV The Investigator was signed in January with Teekay Holdings Australia Pty Ltd.

These activities and many others are made possible because of the quality and scientific excellence of our people. In the last 12 months, I have been proud of the recognition many of our people have received for the positive impact of their work on things that matter to this nation.

In 2010, Mike Raupach of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), while in March 2011 Ezio Rizzardo was ranked 18th in terms of citation impact in the top 100 chemists in the world by US information and analysis company, Thomson Reuters.

Materials Science and Engineering's Kostya Ostrikov was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship on Nano-scale Control of Energy and Matter for Future Energy Efficient Technologies. Kostya also won the Australian Institute of Physics' Walter Boas Medal for an Australian resident who has made the most important research contribution to physics in the past five years.

Jenny Bennett, Journals Publisher at CSIRO Publishing, was made a Fellow of The Royal Australian Chemical Institute Inc (RACI) for eminence within the chemistry profession, and Mick Poole received the 2010 Farrer Memorial Medal for his outstanding contribution to agricultural research in Australia.

The first national and international forestry project to obtain Vietnamese Government recognition for community ownership of forest land, led by Khongsak Pinyopusarerk and Brian Gunn from CSIRO Plant Industry, won the CARD 'outstanding project' for forestry.

Deborah Lau from CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering was named Conservator of the Year, awarded by the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material (AICCM), and CSIRO Land and Water's Rob Fitzpatrick was made Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America.

In other news, internationally renowned molecular ecologist Craig Moritz from UCLA Berkley has accepted a joint ANU/CSIRO position in biodiversity science, and Alastair Robertson has been appointed to Minister Ludwig's Food Chain Policy Working Group and Minister Carr's Food Processing Industries Strategy Group.

I look forward to sharing more news from CSIRO in coming months.

Dr Megan Clark
Chief Executive, CSIRO