 A couple of years ago I was getting ready to host a national conference for the Australian Society of Herpetologists and I had an idea for setting up a new tradition in our society and so we cooked up this idea of developing a crown for the president of the society. My PhD focused on a kind of relationship between bronze casting and elapid snakes of the Canberra region and so this project is about reptiles and amphibians and it's about the scientists that study them. Dr. Mary Little John from the University of Melbourne was one of the founding fathers of the Australian Society of Herpetologists and so when this project was conceived we thought it would be nice to commemorate his involvement early on. When the crown was made we actually arranged to get measurements of his head and so the crown itself and the base that it sits on are made around the dimensions of Dr. Mary Little John's head. I wanted to incorporate all of the different animals that Ash study, so all of the different reptiles and amphibians. The Vice Chancellor's Visiting Artists Fellowship Scheme allowed me to work in the Research School of Biology for a year where I got the opportunity to work alongside some of Australia's leading scientists in the field of herpetology. Scientists are very focused on what they're doing and one of the things that I like about the scheme is that it gives us an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. I think the scheme is very important in terms of giving scientists another view of the world.