Macquarie Academics Awarded National Teaching Fellowships

4 July 2012 Macquarie academics awarded National Teaching Fellowships significant contributions to educational Dr Lisa Wynn leadership in the field. and Dr Mitch Lisa is investigating how university ethics committees are assessing undergraduate Parsell are research in social science disciplines; and barriers teachers and universities face celebrating after in expanding undergraduate student research, particularly in obtaining ethics they were each clearance for human research. Meanwhile, Mitch will be developing awarded a highly standards for distance learning to ensure that students studying online, or via competitive distance education or online blended learning, receive a quality experience Learning and comparable to face-to-face students. The fellowship includes a self-assessment Teaching Mid- of Macquarie University against these standards and an evaluation Career Fellowship. of the potential for their use in intra- The fellowships, part of an $8 million institutional benchmarking. grant program, recognise prominent In addition to the Fellowships, there Photo: Dr Lisa Wynn. scholars who have the capacity to make were three highly competitive national continued page 10 Desert sounds A step ahead of the rest The listen lady Peter Ring is helping make music in the Our Dean of ASAM is putting his best Meet Danielle Frances, one woman on great Australian outback. Foote forward. campus who’s heard it all. Page 1 best FootE forward “Well the next hardest thing to get into was Law at Melbourne. I with another recently arrived post-doc. Together they began to involved with several projects, including research with the Tiwi Simon Foote joined us at guess I would have been a lawyer,” he confesses. create a physical map of the Y-chromosome, but even as they people to find a genetic association for renal disease. He is still the beginning of February Getting into medical school was not quite as he imagined and, were about to publish they were unaware of the significance of interested in the malarial parasite and works to develop new at the beginning, the course wasn’t really interesting to him what they were about to achieve. antimalarial drugs, and he’s excited by the opportunities that as Dean of the Australian at all. “It was at the very beginning of the human genome project and working with ASAM will provide. “During my first few years of medicine, it was the most tedious we were largely oblivious to the politics that surrounded the “It’s a fantastic opportunity with this hospital here to do some School of Advanced Medicine. and boring course and I became sick of it to be honest,” he says. project. We weren’t fully conscious that this was the case until really exciting research. The ability for clinician and researchers the whole thing was released in a blaze of glory,” he says. Disillusioned, he took a year off to work in France as an intern in to work closely together means we have the potential to do With several significant A blaze of glory it was, making front page news around the a biochemistry laboratory. It was here doing pure research that things no one else can,” says Simon. world. The Washington Post compared the accomplishment to achievements in his résumé, he found his true passion. “early exploration of the American frontier.” “It changed what I wanted to do. I ended up spending two For Simon, one of the highlights of the project was working with we find out how a boy from years doing research there and I had an absolute ball. It was the man he describes as “God in terms of molecular biology”: Fast Foote facts probably the best two years of my life,” he says. the farm became the head of a James Watson. Best known as a co-discoverer of the structure * Father of three. His eldest son stayed in Hobart After returning to Melbourne and finishing the remainder of his DNA, Watson came to Simon and his team just as they were to finish school, while his daughter is in Melbourne prestigious medical school. course, he decided that research was what he wanted to focus writing up their final paper. Simon recalls the meeting well: on. He began looking into drug resistance and malaria, and it’s studying Law / Engineering. His youngest son, 14, is Though he has worked hard to get where he is today, in some “We were putting together this physical map. We had a print a topic that continues to interest him today. in school in Sydney. respects it was all down to chance. At the end of high school he out on the table with all of the latest corrections. We showed it had no idea what he wanted to do, so when it came down to Simon’s most famous research project to date was in 1992 at the to Watson and as he had this picture in his hands it was one of * Amateur furniture maker. He’s made several applying for university courses he did what any pragmatically Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology the first times we realised what we had. You could tell he was pieces over the years and recently finished an ‘arts minded boy of 18 would do: (MIT). As a postdoctoral fellow he began developing the first phenomenally excited. And then he folded it up and put it in and craft’ style writing desk and chair. “I just put down the top four courses in order of how hard they map of the human Y-chromosome. It was the first significant his pocket. This is our working version. There were a total of ten * His father was a vet, and had a profound influence were to get in,” he says. “The hardest thing to get into at the time success out of the American genome project, but he says again hours worth of corrections all done by hand. No one had the on his choice of career: he knew he never wanted to was Medicine at Melbourne University, so that’s what I put first”. that it was all down to chance. guts to ask him for it back. So he walked out with it and we lost work in veterinary science. Luckily, Simon had the entrance scores required and the rest is “The only reason I was involved at all really was because there two days of work!” history. But had it been for a few points where would Simon was nothing else for me to do,” he says. His original project at While Simon is proud of his past achievements, his focus is * Despite all the charms of Sydney, Hobart remains be today? MIT fell through just as he arrived, so he decided to team up on the future and research remains central to his work. He is his favourite city. Page 2 Page 3 the Our Olympic hopefuls get ready to compete Hopes are high for five of Macquarie’s LISTEN elite athletes who have been selected to represent Australia at the 2012 London Olympic Games and LADY Paralympic Games. On 29 February, we Sport Scholar Melissa Wu joins the 10-member Australian introduced you to a staff diving team. She has been selected to compete in the 10m member whose birthday platform event. In athletics, Joel Milburn will be part of the men’s 4x400m men’s rolls around just once relay team while Holly Lincoln-Smith will compete with the every four years. Stingers women’s water polo team. Elisa Barnard will compete in women’s archery, and paralympian and Macquarie graduate For today’s 4 July edition, we started Tina McKenzie will be playing on the Australian women’s searching for a staff member with wheelchair basketball team, the Gliders. another famous birthday. Danielle Frances may not share much in common with the USA except a birthday (“I celebrated with some Americans Macquarie and OUA students with “There’s all sorts of subtleties to what we once, on a Contiki tour in Venice on my limited English reading skills and/or do. I’d encourage lecturers to think of 20th birthday?”) but she has more in hearing impairment. us occasionally,” she says. “For example, common with the rest of us than you when you mention an author, perhaps win an Olympic medal in diving when she and her partner might think: she may just have been “The feedback we get from students use their full name – eg David Lucie, Briony Cole competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the listening in on your lectures over the last is that they’re overjoyed with the rather than just ‘Lucie’ – or we’ll spend synchronised 10m platform event. service we provide them at Macquarie six years. hours trying to find the context around Since that time, Melissa, who is studying for a Bachelor of Accessibility Services (MQAS). They tell Raunch culture, philosophy, history, all the Lucies in the discipline area!” Arts-Media at Macquarie, has notched up some notable us that we’d have no idea how much linguistics and psychology - Danielle achievements in the pool. In 2010, she won a silver medal at this is helping them to participate and Generally, though, she says the majority has heard it all while transcribing the World Cup in China in the 10m synchronised platform learn,” she says. of lecturers speak clearly and into the lectures into a variety of formats for the microphone, so the system’s working with partner Alexandra Croak and a bronze medal in the 10m It’s an interesting time in the world of accessibility of students. As the leader well. Danielle’s own system includes individual event.

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