An election is required for the positions of Vice-Presidents and Honorary Librarian following the close of nominations at 5.00pm on Tuesday, 12 March 2020.
For the positions of Vice-President, for which there are three (3) vacancies, there were five (5) nominations. For the role of Honorary Librarian, there were two (2) nominations.
The nominees for these positions were written to requesting that they provide an optional short statement outlining how their expertise and experience fits them for these roles and will benefit the Society. Statements received by the close of business on Monday, 16 March will be posted en bloc by 9.00am on Tuesday, 17 March, while statements received thereafter will be posted as they are received. It is suggested that Members and Fellows who are intending to vote in the Council elections should re-check this page before lodging their vote.
On this page are statements from candidates for the positions of:
Robert Clancy
Thank you for considering this nomination. My background includes 50 years in academic medicine—Foundation Professor of Pathology, Medical School, University of Newcastle: only the world’s second degree that is based on problem-based curricula. I have provided leadership in clinical medicine, tertiary education, mucosal immunology research, and biotechnology; I continue work in each of these areas.
It is a privilege and pleasure to serve the Society, on Council, as a member of the Outreach and the Library and Assets Committees, and recently as Chair of the Events Committee. In these roles, I have contributed to:
My objectives for the Events Committee are to improve the quality control of monthly presentations, to initiate “Thinking Thursdays” for congenial discussion and drinks, and to conduct a History of Science Tour to the UK, culminating with a symposium in Edinburgh to celebrate the Society’s 200thanniversary in 2021.
My reasons for nominating as a candidate for Vice-President are to:
John Hardie
I have been involved with the Royal Society of NSW for almost a quarter of its existence. My unique and extensive knowledge of its workings and history is a valuable asset to the Society. I have been its longest serving President as well as Hon. Secretary, Bulletin Editor, Vice-President and Councillor. I am a Fellow of the Society and have been awarded the Royal Society Medal. I am a dedicated educationalist, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Geological Society of London.
As we approach the Society’s bicentenary, I see its greatest priority as its financial viability in the long term. I will ensure that this is achieved by enhancing our relationship with government, enlarging our membership base and developing a philanthropy footprint. My role as President of the Royal Societies of Australia ensures that members benefit from our relationships with other Royal Societies and learned societies. I have extended the Society’s reach through my efforts to create the Hunter Branch, and will continue this in other regions, especially New England. My work as Chair of the Library and Assets Committee continues as we develop our relationship with the State Library to maximise the value of our most important asset.
The Royal Society of NSW is on the cusp of great things. We have an opportunity to take a leadership role in intellectual discourse in NSW, but we need to tread carefully. As Vice-President I will strike a balance between tradition and innovation such that neither causes the Society to falter.
Brynn Hibbert
I gave a RSNSW OGM lecture to an audience of ten or so in 2008 and have been a Royal Society tragic ever since.
I have served as Chair of the Awards Committee, Council Member, Vice-President and President. I am presently Chair of the Fellows Assessment Committee. As President I presided over the modern flowering of the Society, taking Don Hector’s vision of Fellowship and recruiting many friends and acquaintances, not just from UNSW. Recently I have helped Susan Pond write the Diversity and Inclusion Policy of the Society and look forward to seeing its fruits in the future.
The Enlightenment mission “to encourage … Science, Art, Literature and Philosophy” has always resonated with my view of a thinking person’s Society and, if elected, I look forward to supporting Ian Sloan and the new Council in their work to establish the RSNSW as a leader of serious thought and debate in the State.
Susan Pond
As we collectively seek the correct path through current challenges — drought, bushfires, the SARS-2 pandemic and the global economic contagion — the RSNSW has an important role to play. We must be at the forefront of marshalling and communicating knowledge, enriching public understanding of the issues we face, and devising solutions and opportunities for both the short and long term. As a Council Member during the last year, I have contributed actively to the Society by serving on the Executive and Fellowship Committees, convening the successful 2019 RSNSW and Four Academies Forum “Making SPACE for Australia” held in Government House, and developing and co-sponsoring the Diversity and Inclusion Policy approved by Council on 22 January 2020. I am excited about the opportunity to be elected as a Vice-President of the Society because I wish to contribute further to the intellectual life and advancement of NSW using my experience in leadership roles in business, academia and government, and in combining and working at the interfaces between disciplines. I currently chair the NSW Smart Sensing Network and am Non-Executive Director of several for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. As Vice-President, I will give priority to strengthening the Society’s ranks of Fellows and Members, harnessing the power of collaboration, shared vision, robust debate and communication technologies to achieve our goals, and building financial resilience ahead of the Society’s celebration of its 200th anniversary in 2021.
Judith Wheeldon
Since joining the Royal Society of NSW, I have been active as member of Council, Vice-President, Secretary and member of the Fellows Committee, Chair of Voice and Outreach Committee. Selected achievements: Establishing our relationship with the State Library, organising and improving the Annual Dinner (2020 will be my third), two SMSA lecture series, the Executive Officer appointment, supporting other Members and Fellows in activities they lead.
The Society’s prime purpose is promoting intellectual exchange and that depends greatly on our social interaction. I like people. Welcoming and thanking seem to be two of my strengths. You might know me from my occasional chairing of OGMs, SMSA lectures and two Annual Dinners or from the votes of thanks that I enjoy proposing. I hope I have added value to events, communicated my enthusiasm for the Royal Society and emphasised the importance and pleasure of our intellectual endeavour.
Returned as Vice-President, I will continue to work to improve the Society’s organisational processes, governance, communication systems and professionalism. For our voice to be heard we need quicker responses to events (bushfires, coronavirus, significant visitors to Australia), a higher public profile and a rich and varied program. Most of all, we need Members and Fellows active in the Society, enjoying participation.
This coming year leads to our 200th birthday celebrations. It is amazing that we are one of the oldest organisations in Australia. I want to help lay the foundation for another successful century for the Royal Society of NSW.
Ragbir Bhathal
Dr Ragbir Bhathal has served as the Society's Librarian for a number of years and has the expertise to run and continue to develop the Library into a research library similar to libraries in significant scientific societies in the UK and the US. He started the program to get members of the Society to not only deposit books in the Library written by them but also started a program for members to deposit their biographies which will be collated into a Dictionary of RSNSW Biographies similar to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. He was responsible for organising the Library which was in a mess when it was housed at the Society's premises at Sydney University. With the assistance of a postgraduate student, he was mainly responsible (working on the weekends) for cataloguing the Society's entire collection at that location. He also arranged for the first time for professional valuers to not only value the collection but also to identify the most valuable items and those that the Society needed to restore. He was also a member of the team that was recently responsible for organising the present collection at the State Library.
John Hardie
The Royal Society Library is a unique historical resource. It captures the development of intellectual thought in NSW merely by virtue of its contents, which have been amassed over more than a century. I have been involved with the Royal Society of NSW since the early 1970s and remember the Society’s library when it was housed in Science House before its separation into two collections.
My entire career has been dedicated to making knowledge and information as widely available as possible. For example, I have been a member of the NSW TAFE Knowledge Management Reference Group providing strategic advice to all TAFE Institutes.
I have been the Chair of the Society’s Library and Assets Committee since 2016. In that time, and with their help and advice, I have overseen the successful relocation of half of our library from obscurity in boxes to resplendent display in the Volunteers Room at the State Library of NSW. I have managed a small team of volunteers, who are listing these 5,000 or so volumes, and have engaged a professional restorer to bring them back to life. I have also managed the day-to-day liaison between the Society and the State Library in relation to this ground-breaking project.
If elected, I will continue this work to ensure that in the very near future the Society once again has a functioning library for its members and the wider community. I will also rekindle our relationship with UNE to ensure that the other half of our library remains fully accessible.
This page provides an archive for the agendas, minutes, and other papers for formal meetings held by the Royal Society of NSW, commencing with the year 2020. Papers from past years will be added progressively.
The 2018 Liversidge Lecture of the Royal Society of NSW was delivered at UNSW Sydney on the evening of Thursday, 20 February 2020 by Scientia Professor Martina Stenzel FAA of the UNSW School of Chemistry. Professor Stenzel was introduced by Professor Emma Johnston AO FTSE FRSN, Dean of Science at UNSW, and Emeritus Professor Ian Sloan AO FAA FRSN, President of the Royal Society of NSW, who spoke about the Society and of the prominent role played in its early history by Professor Archibald Liversidge, whose bequest founded the Liversidge Medal and Lecture which is awarded biennially. The 2018 awardee, Professor Martina Stenzel, then presented a fascinating story – a story with two strands.
The first reflected on her own professional journey from early school days in Germany through a succession of university studies, ending up as a post-doctoral researcher at UNSW two decades ago, from which time it has been a continuous success story, up to her present position as a Scientia Professor, with numerous awards along the way. The other strand was the story of the development of polymers, long rows of linked organic molecules, which started with a challenge, in the 1860’s, to make synthetic billiard balls as a replacement for ivory balls. However, the winner, who pocketed $10,000 in prize money, had little idea of what was taking place in the mixture of materials he had come up with in a cut-and-try process, and it was not until 1920 that the theoretical foundations of polymerisation were established.
There followed the development of numerous materials through polymerisation, which we know under the collective term of “plastics” today, but in these materials the length of polymers would vary immensely, from a few hundred to a hundred thousand of the organic building blocks, whereas the polymers found in Nature (and there are many of them) all have very definite lengths. Through studying them, it was found that by adding a certain type of molecule to the polymerising mixture, the length could be controlled reasonably accurately. With this, the basis was established for Martina’s main interest – the creation of nano-sized polymers with various shapes, one of which is a sphere or ball, with a core of hydrophobic material and an outer shell of hydrophilic material. As cancer drugs are mostly hydrophobic, they can be embedded in the core, and by attaching particular molecules to the polymers making up the shell, the nanoparticles will attach themselves predominantly to cancer cells, penetrate the cells, and release the drug.
The whole story, from billiard ball to cancer delivery, had the appearance of a fairy-tale – every time a problem blocked further progress a solution was miraculously found – but it was, of course, no fairy-tale; it was the story of a huge amount of hard work and dedication. And, above all, as Martina emphasised several times, it was the result of collaboration between disciplines – physics, chemistry, biology, and also medicine – and she summed up the moral of the story with “A successful team is better than a team of successful people”.
Since 2020, almost all of the Society's meetings, either face-to-face or online, have been recorded and made available on our YouTube channel. This page provides access to such content, where permission to do so has been granted by the author(s), and is made available under either a Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence or a standard YouTube licence unless otherwise stated. It includes video and audio presentations (with links to YouTube) and slides (in pdf format) presented at Society meetings, where these are of general interest.
This page lists the content for 2023 and 2024.
Content from earlier years can be found in the following archive pages for 2020, 2021, 2022.
1323rd OGM and Open Lecture — 3 July 2024 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2024-3 — 26 June 2024 |
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An evening with Michael Kirby AC CMG FRSN (from Charles Sturt University) — 29 May 2024 |
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1322nd OGM and Open Lecture — 5 June 2024 |
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1321st OGM and Open Lecture — 1 May 2024 |
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1320th OGM and Open Lecture — 17 April 2024 |
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Hunter Branch Meeting 2024-2 — 11 April 2024 |
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Ideas@theHouse: March 2024 — 6 March 2024 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2024-1 — 28 February 2024 |
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Annual Meeting of the Four Societies 2024 — 21 February 2024 |
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1319th OGM and Open Lecture — 7 February 2024 |
1318th OGM and Lecture by the 2022 James Cook Medal Winner — 29 November 2023 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2023-4 — 16 November 2023 |
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1317th OGM and 2022 Clarke Memorial Lecture — 8 November 2023 |
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Joint UNE SRI and RSNSW Presentation 2023-1: 30 October 2023 |
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1316th OGM and Open Lecture — 4 October 2023 |
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1315th OGM and Open Lecture — 6 September 2023 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2023-3 — 16 August 2023 |
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Ideas@theHouse: August 2023 — 10 August 2023 |
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1314th OGM and Open Lecture — 2 August 2023 |
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RSNSW Online Meeting 2023-2 — 5 July 2023 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2023-2 — 15 June 2023 |
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Ideas@theHouse: June 2023 — 14 June 2023 |
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1313th OGM and Open Lecture — 7 June 2023 |
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RSNSW Online Meeting 2023-1 — 5 May 2023 |
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Western NSW Branch Meeting 2023-1 — 20 April 2023 |
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1312th OGM and 2019 Clarke Memorial Lecture — 5 April 2023 |
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1311th OGM and Open Lecture — 15 March 2023 |
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Ideas@theHouse: March 2023 — 2 March 2023 |
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1310th OGM and Open Lecture — 1 February 2023 |
This page provides access to reports on events/meetings hosted by the Hunter Branch of the Royal Society of NSW.