 he says to come over the whole damn town has been waiting for the day when you would come back here there was dancing and talking and stakes on the grill and I think that I will be alright and my ex from high school still looks just the same as she did back in 2009 until the morning let's never put the night on forest through the trees forgot what I was chasing spent so many nights living out at sea that my heart is going back in everybody was close to me all stayed on dry land in the state west I just gotta feel something until the morning because I'm just gonna change my mind I don't want to change my mind she says to come over the whole day when you would come back talking and stakes on the grill and I think that I will be alright and my ex from high school still looks just the same as she did back in 2009 until the morning let's never put the night on good evening welcome to the Looking Ahead lecture series number four my name is Nathan Towney I'm the provice chancellor indigenous strategy and leadership at the University of Newcastle and it gives me great privilege tonight to introduce Aunty Laurel Williams the chairperson of our Neurochi consultancy committee who will be delivering the acknowledgement of country thanks aunt thank you Nathan Kyi Yandine Ndewa hello everyone I am Laurel Williams the bureau of Pi woman I acknowledge today that we all stand on a what we call land in traditional Aboriginal countries there are spaces set aside for a variety of community activities various aspects of cultural education takes place everywhere throughout the environment in all research activities associated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research there are four principles that need to be considered they are self-determination establishing rapport with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through trust and respect is vital for successful research outcomes leadership identifying the appropriate knowledge holders we need Aboriginal communities is the challenge for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers impact and value research activities must be beneficial to Aboriginal communities determined by informed consent not assumption sustainability and accountability the cultural connection to country is forever ongoing ethical considerations in an Aboriginal cultural context needs to underpin any scientific and social research protocols a warbicle country is bounded by dark and young to the south one rural to the west and Warama in the north the seascape which cradles the warbicle lands are the waters of the pacific ocean lake Macquarie and the Hunter River enjoy this beautiful landscape while ever you're on this country Nanda Khumba Khumba thank you good evening colleagues my name is Paul jeans and I have the honor of being both the chancellor of the University of Newcastle and also chair of the Royal Society's Hunter Branch and I'll talk a little more about that in a moment but before doing so can I thank both you Nathan and you Artie Laurel for your welcome to country uh can I also personally acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which our Callaghan campus is located with the Pambalong plan of the warbicle people and pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging tonight is a very interesting occasion and if I can talk about it just for a moment from the perspective of the Royal Society the Royal Society is in its first operational year in the Hunter Valley the Royal Society itself is the oldest learning society learned society in Australia and next year will celebrate its bicentenary it's significant that the Hunter Branch is the first branch of the Royal Society to be formed outside of Sydney apart from a small branch in the southern Highlands and our branch has started off this year with a great deal of enthusiasm and part of that enthusiasm is to conduct a series of public lectures some of those lectures will be co-badged with the University of Newcastle and tonight's lecture is one such lecture it's the fourth lecture from the Royal Society's perspective this year and it's co-adged with the University of Newcastle's Looking Ahead series which is a series from the perspective of both organizations that are conducted into topics of of really interest both interest and importance to the Hunter Valley as it looks forward to the future so this is a very exciting night tonight's speaker is Professor Janet Nelson who is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of Newcastle in this role serves as the University Chief Research Officer with responsibilities for the diverse and comprehensive research enterprise Professor Nelson came from the University of Idaho earlier this year a position at the University she held a Vice-Chancellor in Economic Development prior to that Professor Nelson was the Associate Vice-Chancellor and Research Development at the University of Tennessee she has a keen focus on building and supporting multidisciplinary teams and growing the research enterprise Professor Nelson's over 30 years of experience in scientific research scientific review and research portfolio administration complex and multidisciplinary management business development and science policy implementation she's demonstrated leader with experience accompaniment not-for-profit organizations and industry she's a keen focus on building supporting multidisciplinary teams and growing research enterprise I just like to mention a key aspect of Janet's career to date and that's been around her opening up of university research and administration welcome and facilitate industry partnerships her background includes a role as Director of Business Development at URS Corporation in the United States now director of Biotechnology Innovation Organization in Washington DC and these roles have given her an excellent perspective not only from within academia but from without so she's seen it from industry's perspective which is a great advantage for for us in the Hunter Professor Nelson's also worked very closely with the University of Newcastle's Vice-Chancellor to help to establish the Hunter Hydrogen Task Force to accelerate our region's transition to new methods of energy production and storage so Janet's background is extremely relevant to the Hunter's future and tonight with a panel of interested parties she is both going to present and then hold a panel discussion and then finally you're invited to pose questions during the lecture through the mechanisms of this engaged in and Natalie Thamwattana will collate these questions for reflecting back to Janet at the end of the presentation so if you'd like to keep those questions coming they'll be collated and represented at the end of the presentation so Janet can I invite you to make your presentation and engage with your panel and I'm sure we're all looking forward to a very interesting evening thank you very much indeed thank you Chancellor for for that very warm introduction and thank you to Auntie Laurel for that wonderful welcome to country I need to tell you here in the audience in person and at home that I met Auntie Laurel a few months ago she welcomed me into her home and she's welcomed me to this country and hearing about her culture and experience as a local Aboriginal woman really touched me and I asked her if she would do this this opening tonight and I can't imagine that it could have been better said so thank you very much Auntie I'm really honored to be here I'd like to echo the sentiment of the Chancellor about how wonderful it is that we're able to co-and jointly present this lecture this evening with the Royal Society of the New South Wales I don't know how much you know about the Royal Society but their logo is here on the screen and the little tiny words in the bottom if you translate them say question everything and I think that that reflects a lot of my life and the way I've approached research and the way I continue to approach research administration as most of you know I'm here new to this country but I'm not new to the position I'm in this position because I really love facilitating and enabling research scholarship and creative activity I have a passion for helping enable our researchers and scholars to do this to do this in an engaged way in an interdisciplinary way in a way that really involves multiple stakeholders and thus I've really chosen the title today the Engaged University based on a number of activities that I've been involved in over the last several decades in the United States and that I was attracted to from this position here when I came to the Hunter and that I am so happy to be continuing to help guide tonight we're going to be talking a bit about our strategic plan the looking ahead 2020 to 2025 we'll talk a little bit about our Engaged Living Laboratory model and I don't have time tonight to talk about all the wonderful research scholarship and creative activities that are ongoing here at the Hunter but I'm going to use the opportunity with hydrogen to illustrate some of the connection between our strategic plan and some of our important partnerships and I hope you'll see that with the guests that I've selected so I'm really excited to be here today so many of you have been participating in our lecture series and I hope most of you know that here at the University of Newcastle we announced a strategic plan a brand new strategic plan it was actually announced on my very first day of the position about two days after the COVID shutdown so you can imagine me starting a lot of things at the same time but this is a really important topic to me it really we're going to explore a premise about many parts of this strategic plan today about this engaged research the excellence in the engaged research but I'll I'll talk to you a little bit high level that our strategic plan is really important that we really have a passion for the student experience and for souvenir in our communities you'll see that at the very center of the strategic plan diagram here in the middle of the screen surrounded by the words that Nathan and anti-law reminded us about about our commitment to the indigenous um higher education and sustainability and what we would really like to be I think sums it up in the words you've probably heard we want to be a world leading university for our region so we have values of excellence of equity of engagement and sustainability and today we're going to talk a lot more about our engagement priorities I was really happy as I was reflecting on what I might say tonight to to read a statement that came out last week from the Minister for Education and it's like this is great he's really encouraging collaborations between universities and businesses and I thought we're already doing this it's like he read our minds and we're right there and we're ready this is an important priority that the the federal government is focusing on encouraging and incentivizing universities to collaborate with industry and the government has made it really clear that we want job ready graduates and what better way to provide these job ready graduates is then through the research and the connections that you're going to hear more about tonight I told you I was going to use one model to illustrate some of what we're doing with our living lab and collaborations and tonight I've chosen to talk a bit about how this work that we're doing at the university aligns with national in fact global priorities there's been a lot of publications lately a lot of articles in the paper and other places that talk about our national strategy our hydrogen strategy national hydrogen roadmaps here at the university we formed a hydrogen task force we're looking to build a cluster in the area and hydrogen hubs so you'll probably I hope continue to hear a lot more about these activities and we'll ask our guests who all have a tangential association with this hydrogen and the hydrogen roadmap a few questions about that today as well as how they have been engaged with the university but first let me stop and step back about 20 years ago it seems like it wasn't that long ago but in 1997 there was a book that put out by Donald Stokes and if you haven't seen this book I'd encourage you to take a look it talks about the past year's quadrant and when I first read the book I thought this really resonates with me because as a scientist I'd often thought of life and research in a very linear fashion there were the group of scientists that did very basic research and in this quadrant here if those of you who remember back to your year 12 you probably remember Neil's bore and learning all about the atomic theory well that's very basic research and maybe that's all the basic research that you remember from year 12 I don't know but it's still important and then there were those that did very applied research and a typical example of this is what Thomas Edison did in all his experiences he had 10,000 failures on the way to making the the right filament for the light bulb but he got there but it was a trial and error by use inspired but what Donald Stokes promotes is it doesn't have to be basic or applied we could actually have a fourth area where these two areas intersect and it would be two-dimensional form a quadrant that he called the past year's quadrant named after a lot of the famous work that Louis Pasteur a French biologist micro biologist did you perhaps heard of some of the the pasteurization of milk or other beverages but this work was really both basic fundamental research and also use inspired research and it's really an area of this intersection that became more of a passion of the types of research that I really like to engage and encourage but let's take this a step further I was involved in the United States in a number of groups and one of them was the high bar research association and you may hear more about high bar research here at the university because I think that we might become one of the first international members but what this what this does is adds the element of engagement to this area known as the past year's quadrant so first if you take on the left the past year's quadrant that we just discussed and what I like to do is turn it on its end diagonally to imply that basic or use inspired research one isn't more important than the other at all but what are the magic happens is when we take this to the third dimension and we add engagement we engage with our local government state government federal government community members our natives our neighbors our industrial and commercial members all of the people that make up our community come together and this is what makes this research so powerful the research that we do is not research that's designed in a silver city alone in a university it's research that's begun by dialogue with our engaged partners it's continued side by side with our researchers working with other researchers and with these partners and it's continued with the help of these partners to actually move into the community and to give us real solutions to real world problems this really ties in it's so exciting to tie into our engagement priorities as we dive into our strategic plan I think that the engagement priorities have picked four beautiful areas of focus that really resonate with things that we have in the hunter that are so important better healthier living next generation resources connecting communities and growing industries and we try to do this in a model called the living laboratory model that really unites invention and discovery and engagement and embraces all these parts and I think you'll see that in several of the examples tonight now I really wanted to give a sneak preview of perhaps some coming up lectures because we have so much research here so I'm going to give a very micro vision of two or three other projects that are ongoing in the university before we move into our hydrogen project so first engineers and scrubs I think there's not a person in the audience or or online that hasn't realized that we're in a very challenging year in 2020 with COVID well I think this is the perfect opportunity for the university to step up and do some of the things it needs to do and our university here at new council has done that there were needs with proper ventilators many of you have heard the amp control story there were needs to produce face shields and I think you've heard from our last speaker Paul Dolfstur who was very involved in rapid prototyping there were needs for sanitizers and so what was fun was that here at the university our scientists our engineers our biomedical sciences met with the local community with our collaborators at HMRI with our collaborators at the local New England health district and with many of our community partners to develop new products and rapid rapid solutions that's all I get to tell you about that tonight many of you also know about these very important research about contamination assessment and remediation in the environment and this is a story here that again I'm only going to give you a snippet about it's led by professor Ravi Nadu here at the university it's a cooperative research center program which the logos you can't see on the left intentionally are the original 29 partners which have even expanded since then but this is a program that was started and in partnership by the Australian government department of industry science energy and resources and we really have had so many successes out of this if you can squint and see in the picture I think you'll see one of our panelists is actually in a visit in this picture and she might talk about some of the things she experienced as she saw firsthand Ravi's a bit of Ravi's work and here's another teaser of what's coming up with some work around work that was really driven by stakeholder engagement in an effort to look at the nuisance of biting on the campus and I'll tell you from the time I spent in Minnesota the mosquitoes here don't worry me but this work was really a genesis of some of the work of a project that came out of 2019 devices grand challenge on mosquitoes and has been now a collaboration that's looking at a bacterial a bacteria that can suppress the virus replication again I'm not going to tell you much more about this but it just shows that our work here doesn't occur in isolation Syro is an important partner the city of Newcastle is an important partner we partner with other universities that I won't name out loud but they're shown on the screen they're important too so the government and then certainly the philanthropy and the generosity of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is very important in all this so with those teasers let's me move into the hydrogen economy hydrogen is simple it's two atoms dihydrogen is what it is technically I actually know quite a bit about hydrogen the chancellor didn't tell this in an introduction but I've run two major research projects around hydrogen one actually very very basic and understanding molecular structure of hydrogen complexes and one very very applied in terms of running fuel stations but I don't do research anymore I just help enable it but if you look at this complex picture and you start reading about hydrogen there's so many parts to hydrogen we need to make hydrogen we can use hydrogen we can store hydrogen we can transport and export hydrogen we can ship hydrogen to places that don't have it or we can ship products that are made with hydrogen to places it's used for things such as a production of ammonia and I think that many of these other areas are things that you've heard about quite a bit so what we're looking to do is really build some infrastructure here in the hunter to have a hydrogen hub that can interact with the university that can interact with those folks that can really do the technical innovations that are needed to firsthand interact with the energy generators the energy consumers our partners like Syro local government companies such as oracle in terms of some of the things that are really important to drive this and I think we're timed with a very very important intersection of time and opportunity and region to really lead some of this work here so with that what I'm going to do is I'm going to show a short video of one of the projects that is ongoing here at the university that has integrated into our hydrogen work and I think you'll enjoy seeing firsthand some of the technical work that's happening the hydro harvester is an atmospheric water generation technology developed at the university of Newcastle it is capable of extracting moisture from the air and producing water for drinking or irrigation at any location the hydro harvester absorbs water from the air at night using silica gel during the day solar thermal energy or waste heat is used to produce a hot humid air stream this air is then cooled using ambient air as a heat sink to produce water our approach makes the process independent of the ambient temperature and humidity which is a key limitation of existing refrigeration based technology refrigeration based technologies operate by cooling air below the dew point this requires a lot of electrical energy to cool large volumes of air the hydro harvester works by initially heating the air and then using this hot air to diesel water from the silica gel hot air holds significantly more water vapor than cold air so cooling hot humid air to ambient temperature requires less air to be cooled the hydro harvester uses significantly less electrical energy than existing technologies and can operate over a wide range of conditions it can also be coupled with waste heat from any process which further reduces the cost of the technology the first hydro harvester prototype reached the final of the water abundance x prize and was highly commended at the institute of chemical engineers global awards in 2018 three prototypes have been developed so far with the performance of the technology improving with each modification this project will allow the designer the hydro harvester to be finalized and the technology to be ready for manufacturing and deployment let me see if I can there we go so this is just one example of of of nearly two dozen projects here at the university that have to do with hydrogen this featured professor badad motodari's hydrogen harvester and it was a funded project by the austrian renewable energy agency but what you can see in this picture now is putting together the pieces so on the front right you see this hydro harvester this harvester is providing a water source and it's very important in electrolysis to produce hydrogen and oxygen from the splitting of water to have ultra pure water which is an expensive proposition and so this has solved one of those puzzle pieces of the puzzle the green unit the storage looking unit behind the hydro harvester actually houses an electrolyzer which is what splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen and you'll see that behind there are some solar panels so the energy to run this hydro harvester to run the electrolyzer is coming from a renewable source and then the hydrogen is stored in these red cylinders ready to go on to other parts of the the story that you're going to hear about more but it's really exciting too and when we meet with one of our guests I think you'll hear a neat piece about the oxygen a waste product a byproduct from this reaction so with this I'm going to conclude my my part of the conversation and invite us to turn to our guests we have three panelists guests today Dr Priscilla Tramain is is a researcher here at the university she has been at the university for a number of years she's a first generation university student and she came from none less than here in the Newcastle area from Toronto I've really gotten to enjoy meeting Priscilla and hearing her story and I hope the cameras are starting to to go on to stage to our guests really exciting where Priscilla was an undergraduate here she was a graduate here and I think she's well on her way to becoming an amazing academic independent academic here at the university second I'd like to introduce Ms. Morvin Cameron who's the chief executive officer from the Lake Macquarie City Council when I met Morvin I really want to say that I was struck by how passionate she is about excellence and innovation in local government and so why invite her to the panel well I think she thinks very strategically about new ways to do things and I hope she'll talk a little bit today about the creation of the economic development company Dantia and part of her vision behind that frankly also I owe Morvin a big thanks to helping introducing me to the sailing scene so this is the way I'm repaying you for such kindness and lastly I'd like to introduce Dr. Kirsten Malloy who is a business leader who has served as a company director on a wide range of boards including NRMA the Hunter Water and the HMRI Kirsten and I have a very similar background we're both chemists and her dad was an academic here my dad was an academic as well and I've had the pleasure of serving this year beside Kirsten on the HMRI board and I know that she's really contributing to the guiding the partnership of HMRI the university and the local health district to really make a difference to community I also would like to introduce now she'll be joining us a little bit later Dr. Natalie Tamotana who is a professor in the school of mathematics and physical sciences and Natalie is also a member of the New South Wales chapter of the Royal Society so Natalie will help moderate and discuss facilitate some of the discussion I know that all the slides have had a QR code so those of you in the audience who have questions and those of you who want to send in questions to the QR code Natalie will help pass those on to our guests and so with further ado no further ado I'd like to join our panel well good evening thank you so much for being here thanks for having me Priscilla can you tell us a little bit more of your story of coming to the University of Newcastle I think the audience would love to hear a bit more of what made you come here and perhaps is Newcastle a typical university and is it what you expected yeah so I grew up in Toronto which is located in Lake Macquarie around Newcastle and so I went to high school there and I was always interested in going to university my parents had instilled it in me since I was young go to university get as high as you can do do as much as you can and because Newcastle is so close to Sydney there's a lot of universities in Sydney that are really they have the draw cards of that they're ranked higher than Newcastle and they're very academically prestigious but we had some visitors from the university come to our high school and present to us and I really saw there was an industry focus with the degrees that they offered at the university so they came to us and they said we're working with all of these mining companies the energy companies manufacturing in our region and that was what really drew me to stay here it was that industry focused as well as the academic side of the university thanks Priscilla it's great to have you and I'm really happy to have gotten to know you through these years and I hope we continue our relationship can't wait so more of an introduction I hinted that I might be asking you a little bit about Dantia and and how you think differently about innovation and delivering services differently can you talk a little bit about that for us please sure yeah Janet I'm I'm not sure about the thinking differently let me talk about Dantia so we created the Lake Macquarie Economic Development Company in 2014 and at that time we were really looking at the city's economy and looking at what was happening we're we were a city full of very traditional industries and those industries where we're changing and we're going to change very quickly and we felt as a city that we needed to do something different in order to support and assist our economy Lake Macquarie partly through geography has a history of not delivering the services to the community but enabling the community to deliver services for themselves so we don't run our sports fields and our tennis courts and our community buildings we enable local community groups to do that my background was in community development and therefore I knew that model and when given the responsibility of rethinking economic development it seemed like a logical way to do it was to use a similar model and engage local business people who live in the city had built businesses where building businesses in the city to actually participate and contribute to forming this company and and really that the board or the board is made up of nine people the mayor and myself and seven local business people who who give up their time and contribute with the vision of growing and supporting the economy in our city that's great we'll love to hear more about how economic development fits into this story and this engagement what about how can the university work more with the the council and with Dantia and with SMEs in big business and small business that's a that's a great question I think if I can go back to year four year four quadrants at local government tends to live down in that bottom quadrant of we're doers people who work in local government work there because they like to solve the problem and deliver services and I see when we when we talked originally I see a really great convergence between those of us who live in this space of just solve the problem and get on and deliver and pure science and if we can meet in the middle I think the university can offer us tremendous support to improve our data analytics and improve our research and our testing we're continually trying to instill test try you know be be brave to deliver services differently and I think the university can provide a huge amount of support to our to our employees in in that in that space so that we can continue to really deliver high quality services to our community thank you Marvin Kirsten you and I have had a lot of different conversations in a lot of different ways and I've been just struck with the number of different career experiences you've had and how you've been able to synthesize these and I think it's really struck me about your passion for partnerships perhaps can you reflect on some of your experiences and how they've shaped your thoughts about partnerships yeah sure certainly my career I seem to have worked across a lot of partnerships and even my PhD was industry sponsored as well as university sponsored so I think it's one of those patterns through your life I enjoy the process of trying to understand how to make partnerships work their collaborations and there's always multiple parties involved by the very nature of them which means there's complexity in understanding everyone's needs and finding that sweet spot where there's an alignment and a value that can be released and shared amongst the participants in a way that that that means it's worth the energy and the effort to collaborate because it is more time more talking more discussion and more processes need to be set up so people can trust the process of how the the partnerships actually managed I think smaller scale things can be done on a more individual basis and things like that but once things start to scale you really need those processes because there will be conflict there will be differences in view and those things need to be resolved and they need to be driven by a belief and hopefully a reality that there's value to be unleashed through people working together because it's quite hard for people to work together I think often we like our own way of doing things and we have our own answers to everything and and so there really has to be some sort of a fundamental value or a real value driver that that brings people together but I find it's incredibly rewarding because the value that can be unleashed through working with others and through recognising that we probably only know a few percent of you know what we can contribute to any one environment not a hundred percent there's always that opportunity to learn so it's incredibly rewarding but it can take patience resilience time and yeah incredibly good process to underpin how those engagements work do you have any insights to what makes some of the successes work what's the secret sauce to those processes that you're talking about I do think there is a mindset around collaboration that that's something that it's beyond you and you as an individual so I think having that right sort of leadership and sometimes the right pressure points just to to push push through sometimes what seem like perhaps insurmountable challenges to to let a bigger picture take place and that sometimes in collaborations you absolutely have to step back and say I was a little bit of that but none of us are going to be all of it and let people share in the wins so I think that's yeah that's a really important component great Priscilla from your view as a student and as an emerging academic how have you seen industry and the community engage with the university well I think so I work at the Newcastle Institute of Energy and Resources and so that's sort of a real hub for the university of industry engaging with the university and so a lot of our research is actually funded by industry and so that usually comes about with government initiatives such as arena we've got ARC linkage we've got innovation connections which is more for small medium enterprises and those are good ways for industry to engage with the university but we also have had another side of it where we've gone out and showcased some of the basic research we've been doing through press releases an example of that was the water harvester that you showed earlier in your presentation so we originally designed that process as part of a competition that we entered we showcased it through some press releases and from just getting that out into the community we got a lot of leads into forming more industry partnerships so that was how we got into that arena project with the renewable hydrogen and the renewable methane it was just getting that point of contact people's having a face to to contact and engage in order to basically form that partnership with industry and what do you find that's important once you've made that initial connection what keeps it going how do you keep engaged and I think that's that's the problem I think with academics and industry often industry finds academia is moving too slow when they're not keeping up with the pace that they want so we've really found in our research group that the way to keep the partnership going is to from the beginning set realistic targets and then keep delivering on what we say we're going to deliver and if you can do that with industry they're happy to keep coming back and working with you if they've got more problems if you can continue to solve them in a timely manner it's really just remembering that we really have alignment we really want a lot of the same goals that's it so you hinted and talked a little bit about one funding source arena morgan are you able to talk a minute turn a little to hydrogen now I think you've been involved with an arena project with hydrogen are you able to share any of the details about that I can at a high level genet okay we've got a current grant application actually in with the arena that is looking to it's a very long project and it's a pretty pretty large project certainly by local government standards but the ultimate aim if it all works is that we will actually convert our garbage trucks our waste fleet to run on hydrogen as opposed to running on we currently run on diesel fuel there's a number of stages for us to get through but ultimately we would end up with a hydrolyzer owned not by us by one of the partners in the grant and we would over time replace we've got 23 waste general waste trucks if successful I would like to think that we also run we don't run but we have in our city recycling trucks and green waste trucks and if you exponentially think what's possible out of that grant I don't know the numbers in the hunter but we'd be in the hundreds of of heavy vehicles and that's only waste if we can prove this technology with heavy vehicles with the particular stop start nature of waste trucks then the general heavy vehicle industry will have tremendous knowledge about the opportunities that hydrogen will present as a as a fuel for the future and that's the great I know you can't give us a lot more details than that but it really is a a way to spark our imagination and our thoughts about that so so so Kirsten I'm going to turn to this I know that you have a really strength in the background and resources can you give some insights from your perspective of what do you see is what kind of impact hydrogen could have in our region what are some other examples yes certainly I guess is a source of electricity it can play a vital role clearly and I think you have the data up there is 83 percent of the state's electricity is generated through the central coast in the Hunter and because that's predominantly coal and we know one of the coal-fired power stations will be closing so clearly a hydrogen solution has a very different sustainability footprint so that's you know a real positive it's also very sensible to use other infrastructure to the maximum ability that we can so we have the infrastructure in place to to you know move electricity where it needs to go so in terms of utilizing that infrastructure it may say a lot of sense for this part of the world to continue to be an important energy and electricity generator for the for the state and the country and so really important that this kind of project a hydrogen project is happening in this part of the world because I think that's got a really important role to play and really that base load electricity is really quite important you know solar is great but it's only there when the sun shines and so that's a you know a challenge so yeah really important I think opportunity and exciting to see a focus on it in the region and from a chemist's point of view I think you probably understand a lot of the chemistry that occurred at orca when you work there and ammonia can you talk about the other value streams that come out of hydrogen yeah and certainly I mean we've got a manufacturing footprint here and and I think we've seen the importance in COVID times of maintaining and growing that so there's an energy sort of requirement certainly one of the products made at orcas ammonia at the plant there so certainly anything that you know enables that it's a product that's in commercial use for lots of different things so yeah it definitely is an input to making ammonia it's got potential and I'm sure there's many others and my chemistry's a little lapsed at this point I can give you a briefer of chemistry but they come mostly in jokes these days instead of in lectures so we'll save those for our drinks after Priscilla it was really fun to hear a little bit about the genesis of some of the hydrogen renewable projects that you've been working on with the priority research center here one of the things that has struck me is that I mentioned it with the video is some of your involvement in some follow-up projects with PFAS maybe you can explain a little bit about what PFAS is and why the oxygen that's a byproduct from this hydrogen projection could actually tie into this story so nicely yeah so um PFAS is actually an environmental contaminant so it's out there in the environment at the moment there's a big issue up at Williamtown it was found in firefighting foams so it's contaminated soils and waters basically across Australia wherever they've used these firefighting foams particularly at defence bases and so there's a lot of interest in trying to find a way that we can basically destroy this PFAS substance because it basically sustains itself in the soils and the waters for an extensive period of time so the main way that they destroy the PFAS at the moment is to thermally treat it so that requires a lot of energy and there's no real useful products that you can get out of that so with our work that we were doing on renewable hydrogen so our director at our research center professor Badad Mokdaderi he initially came up with this concept that we could make some value-added products from PFAS contaminated waters so to produce hydrogen you can reform methane so you basically add methane and water into a reactor and then out of that you produce CO2 and hydrogen so basically what his initial concept was was to react PFAS contaminated water with methane and then you produce this hydrogen but then you also get some other useful byproducts this was an initial concept that Badad had come up with and then we found an industry partner Evocra who also have a technology to concentrate this PFAS contaminated water so it basically takes some of the water out so you've got a more concentrated substance and they actually use ozone in order to concentrate this water so using that oxygen to basically screen the water I suppose and concentrate it down into something that's more useful in our process where we get this hydrogen product but then we also have some other useful byproducts as a result of this reforming process that can be used in other chemical industries so yeah that's one of the interesting ones that it sort of went through a whole process we started with this hydrogen but then it has applications in other industries like solving contamination problems yeah it's interesting from some of my experiences in industry too that sometimes you have a byproduct and you are paying to get rid of it and you can find a value stream sell your byproduct and sometimes the byproduct makes more money than an initial product not a bad problem to have is it well staying on some of our scientific theme I know that we were really really delighted to host two more of them here a few weeks ago to see near our our institute and to have a chance to visit some of the labs it is great I think it's probably the first university I've had local government agree to come on site and and and on the white coats and glasses but one of the things that was so exciting that really I think illustrates some of this industrial pull for our research was when Ravi was talking about one of his technologies and it struck to you about a question about black slag would you mind recanting some of that story yeah certainly I'm embarrassed to say I've been in the region about 15 years and it was the first time I've visited near but geez it was fantastic I can't remember the specifics of the story but Ravi was talking about how there was a soil with contaminant in it and he and his team had sort of processed it to the point where they had been able to make the soil get the contaminant out of the soil and actually use much like a Priscilla story use the the contaminant as a byproduct and I had with me a couple of people from my team and we all looked at one another and said well you need to tell us what you can do with black slag so black slag is a byproduct from the lead and zinc smelter that was in our city for well over 100 years I found out the other day it was the first heavy industry factory in the hunter in the hunter region and it was in the late 1800s it operated until about 2001 in a site in our city and produced two two contaminants an airborne contaminant but more importantly and black slag is a is a byproduct and it was a it was considered a fun it's it's got everything in it lead zinc a bit of silver but a carium all sorts of things traditionally it says kind of glass glass sort of texture and it was historically thought that all of the contaminants were bound in the glass so it was a safe product it it drew it compacts really well and it drains really well so if you're building a road it's perfect if you're building a sports field or a park it's perfect if you're building your own driveway it's perfect and as a result we have black slag literally right across our city we believe in the hundred years about 2.1 million tons was produced and people used to anecdotally I people used to turn up with their trailer and just take a little bit of black slag from the factory gate to do their garden to build their driveway as well as council using it for many years we stopped I believe in the 70s our our management at the minute in most of the city is simply to cap and contain because to do anything else is just extremely cost prohibitive so when Ravi was telling the story about taking soil and getting all of these contaminants out of it and being able to do something with it Tim and Debbie and I all went we need to send you a bag full of this stuff now it you know it may be that it's not possible there's obviously got to be a cost effective element given where we know there's more than a million tons still in the city but we all got pretty excited and that's progressed we've written a brief for Ravi's team and and they're you know they'll be commencing anytime now starting to see if there's something they can do they can do to help our city as a city council we have the problem on our facilities but a huge number of our residents have also have that problem so it's not just a council to council to university this is this this has opportunities for our entire community and really the community could really impact that but you know Kirsten I'm going to turn to you I have seen um this is a great story but I have seen it's been a hurdle a lot of times to get that initial dialogue happening I know the the scientist engineers researchers that I know are are yearning to do something and industry or others often have a problem but we it's a hurdle to have that be told and heard and say oh I can fix that what other hurdles have you seen working across major industries and do you have any solutions to to how we might solve them other than having everybody come to near every day of the week yeah I think um I mean connectivity is a hugely important thing and it's certainly where innovation happens is where there's a lot of often informal contact even within businesses where you have a lot of informal contact between different teams and different groups um then you'll you'll get an exchange an idea and then things will will grow from there and so I think it's a sort of a multifaceted sort of strategy around how how you engage and deliberately and in quite a formal way and um putting you know the vice chancellor's challenges out there are things like that draws in lots of people all the way through to informal contact and trying to make sure that that happens so that these sorts of conversations do just start because um that's really where you know where ideas do begin and I think I've certainly seen the university reaching out and I know this university has a really um rates very very highly on its industry partnerships and I think it's got to do that industrial history and things like that um not to say that there's not more opportunity I've certainly also found both being a student but then also being kind of an employer having students come through businesses and there's a real there is sort of a continuum between sort of something that's very driven by the uni and you know it might be your IP and things like that and bringing people into businesses to then work on some things um all the way through to then you know you get to see that person and and and what value they can offer and they move more into the business over time but maintaining the connections with the university so I think the big focus on on having um work integrated learning as part of um what you do here is really important because it will also bring people who've been in business a long time um into conversations with with students and people who are studying and researchers so I think it's a you know everything from quite formal deliberate activities all the way through lots of informal things and the Newcastle and the Hunter and the Central Coast is a of a size where you know we can get across the industries that are here and understand them so yeah I think um encouraging communications for the main thing but an informal connection is really really important and probably as important if not more important sometimes in the formal the formal connections so we hope to be able to to structure the unstructured then right that's right well pretty soon I think we're going to turn to some questions so Natalie you might be thinking of getting ready this um actually I'm talking about the stereotype you talked quite a bit a little bit or a little bit I guess about local governments being trapped in the day to day and and a university being at this research driven do you want to follow up a little bit on Kirsten's comments and how do we get over these hurdles yeah sure I think um I think there needs to be uh well I think that two things from Lake Macquarie's perspective we have it's only when you start asking that you suddenly find that as an organization we've got lots of involvement in with the university already right through the right through the organization often we it just happens and we don't know about it but I think really and I think we might talk about it later but we're talking currently about an MOU and a partnership agreement in my experience it's about for local government it's about really giving permission to the staff to reach out and say call somebody at the uni they probably know and also making sure that there's somebody at the uni that if they call they get a a friendly you know it's quite in they can be quite intimate so can local government council buildings be quite intimidating buildings if you're going in there for a you know if you're not sure what you're doing but universities can be quite daunting places so for me uh we'll talk a bit but the whole partnership agreement is about really flagging to anyone in the organization and we this is a cultural we really instill in our staff if you've got a problem you have to share it even within the our own organization I think there's another level for us now to say you know there'll be very few problems in local government that someone else hasn't come up against and maybe if they haven't solved it they've at least started to think about solving and I really think the university here can help can help us certainly with our encouragement our staff just broadening their horizons and and having a an institute that horizons scans all the time and can can support our staff for me it's about really enabling the staff to feel comfortable and confident to reach out and on these hurdles Priscilla do you have any other thoughts to add I mean I think as more of an and I think touched on it's like it's having like universities are daunting it's like giving industry a point of contact like giving them someone that they can talk to engage with and then send them in the right direction point them to someone who can help and it's about yeah getting that communication started like so it being informal like starting on that level and then slowly progressing through to something that I that is formal great well I really enjoyed leading some of this conversation with our guests tonight and I'd like to turn to Natalie I think you've been collecting some questions from the audience yes we do we have some questions now Jeanette so the first question can you tell us more about the new MOU between the universities and Lake Macquarie Council yeah I'll start by saying I've got an aversion to the term MOU or Memorandum of Understanding it's just legal and intimidating term that the lawyers understand and everybody else goes what's that so we we we refer to it and hopefully that the agreement will end up being referred to as a partnership agreement and it really is about saying funnily enough we had the first session to start to construct the the agreement recently and it's amazing how similar the universities new values and focus areas in your strategic plan are to councils values and you've even got one connected communities and it's also one of ours I mean the similarities are immense so I think it's about drawing those similarities giving a framework to the relationship but for me the most important thing is at the back end of the agreement there's a list of projects that actually says in the short term this is what we're going to work on together in the medium term this is what we're going to work on together and we actually then meet regularly so that you get both formal and informal connection and we actually can show in six months and a year's time the benefit that the community in the end it's about the community both the university community and the hunter community have gained from us working collectively together as opposed to working in different quadrants to use the analogy that that Janet gave us earlier thank you okay so the next question started with the comments it's so impressive to see such a strong panels of women since them building partnership partnership with industry so this question is for Priscilla what strategies have you put in place to build your network with industry and research in STEM um so I think it's there's a lot of networking events out there that um we can take part in I don't even just engineers Australia we have things related to STEM and then there's the um the hunter net the women's um women in STEM sort of network in in Newcastle but then in terms of like engaging with industry uh it's it's all about those government initiatives that that are there um them coming to the university engaging there and then us being able to form a partnership with them and then deliver on whatever projects or ideas that we've come up with and Janet the university has a platform to foster this partnership the women in STEM with the industry and yes we do have we do have a STEM alliance and I think some of the examples of the the women and engineering scrubs is coming out of that and we have other alliances too to help form it too but let me add to that too I think it's broader in my view than just STEM it's really all the scholarship creative activity and research that all comes together and I think sometimes we we focus a lot on the STEM but we forget about all the interdisciplinary actions I can I can just reflect on on one of the events I got to go to this weekend which was um very very very touching to me it involved a project with Hunter water and the university and with the the local um school Newcastle High many of you know that that our provice chancellor Nathan Towney used to be the principal at at Newcastle High School it was a project that he envisioned he worked with a number of of students they were mostly um from the Wabakal and the Warami tribes and they envisioned a story a story to help explain using culture and using creative methods of how do we help communicate how important it is to preserve our water and be there for the future and I thought this is a creative project this falls just into the same types of things we're talking about it's not STEM but it's really broad across our university it's lovely so this question is for all the three panelists so besides the hydrogen hub projects and other projects that Janet has mentioned can you identify some other opportunities for us to work together I've got to list this long I think the the values and things you had up earlier Janet are really good because they they cover a lot of the concerns we have about community about environment sustainability about how to grow and there's just lots of opportunity lots of problems to solve and lots of things and I I'm very passionate about STEM women in STEM but I also think it's really important that I think a lot of innovation is going to come from multi-disciplinary activity and the ability for people in very different professions and different skill sets coming together actually it's a really huge part of successful collaboration is is actually how you how you leverage difference because I think the solutions that we need for a lot of these problems are very complex there's social aspects to them there's technical aspects to them community aspects so there's there's all sorts of things that we have to think about so I think it's a huge I think it's a really long list and I think the thing about ideas when you say how do we tap into that is that there's going to be so many and it's then filtering through and and trying to figure out how to prioritize probably too many opportunities versus the amount of resource we actually have yeah and I think to add to that from a university perspective like the the ideas and projects that we pursue are usually ones that are going to be funded so if we can basically form these partnerships and then find areas of new funding it's it's much easier if we have the partnership we know the problem that we need to solve then we can actually attack that and have proper funding to basically get the solution that we need if we're not forming these partnerships and working to like the list of things that we can work on is endless and then we're always trying to come up with new ideas that we think are going to attract that funding but if we can create that engagement before we start on the the mind map of what we need to do then we're already on the trail to finding a solution because we know we're going to have the proper resources in order to to get through to the solution yeah that gave me time to filter look look already we we work really closely and and I'll probably give some examples of of the projects we're already working on um we're working very closely with Professor Roberta Ryan who's a local government local government expert I was so excited when I heard Roberta was coming to Newcastle and she's she's new here even just the fact that that Newcastle University have chosen to appoint Roberta as a local government academic for me was a real was a real positive we're working with Roberta on a whole lot of um a whole lot of work around community consultation and community engagement which is one of her her passions we're also working with her a little bit on on data analysis and how we present our data you know we collect a lot of information from our community about how they feel about this or whether they like this or that and and we can we can definitely improve the way that's presented and the readability and the understanding of it with them with some assistance from Roberta's team we're doing that I'll share a great story if I've got time we ran a year and a half ago we ran a an architecture competition with the with the faculty here for performing art space the multi-arch pavilion in Spears Point Park that'll begin construction before Christmas and it was a student it was a Newcastle open to Newcastle University students one of the students won she's now in Sydney working but she's about to see her first ever building being constructed what a year maybe a year and a half after after finishing that's been a fantastic project it'll be the first multi-archs place of its type in we think in Australia certainly on the eastern seaboard it's modeled on some of the sort of pop-up venues you see in the Biennale in Europe and in other places in Europe so we've already got a lot of these a lot of these opportunities and yeah as soon as I start thinking about it the problem is filtering and that's one of the reasons with the partnership agreement is why it's so important to put down a few is otherwise we'll do a little bit in too many and and the story about what we're what we're creating and and how we're succeeding will be so much harder to tell and really the idea of saying let's let's focus and and you know move on is about that idea just endless well I think time's up for me and even though we have many equations Dennett's and her team will compile the equations and then answer that and put the answer ups online so thank you so much for the panels and I'll hand this floor back to Dennett thank you great Natalie thanks so much but before you go away Natalie maybe I can ask you that same question that you just asked us totally put you on the spot either as a professor here at the university with your own research or with your engagement with the Royal Society where do you see some of the most pressing questions there's a lost equation I just ran this the workshops on mathematics in industry study group where we um mathematicians get together and then we look for a question that can be solved with mathematics and computer science so there's a lot of questions out there so in terms of so we deal with industries such as the the con crush which is the dust modeling we deal with problems in level spring where they're doing furnace they try to build the furnace to optimize the energy using and also we're doing a lot of other things so actually there's a lot of mathematical problem out there that we can we can solve and yeah so for me um there's an opportunity that mathematician can help send it's good to know that industry could you know benefit from having the mathematical modelings as well so that's great and to have you get the input early on so you model the things that really make an impact out and I'm really interested in hydrogen hubs and then and be involved with the project in terms of doing the modelings as well thank you Natalie thank you so I know we only have a few minutes here I think that the Chancellor Paul Jean's had a few comments that he wanted to make and a reflection of tonight's dialogue thank you very much Jenna and and thanks also to Priscilla to move on and to Kirsten it was lovely to have your involvement and your perspective but but I think more importantly than anything to gauge your enthusiasm I mean it's a very interesting time where we're facing now COVID has fundamentally changed a number of things but from a university perspective it's really challenged the university business model the idea that there were enormous revenues dreamed from international students is something that's changed and may well be changed forever I think there's also a recognition from government that Australia's self-sufficiency in many areas has to be re-examined and as part of the combination of those two activities the role of universities is being re-examined particularly in terms of universities roles in economic and social development and I think tonight's been an outstanding example not only of how a university can be more integrated with its stakeholders in the community but but how our university which is quite unique given its its presence in its footprint can have a real impact on the future of the hunter I mean the hunter to any Novaastrian is of enormous importance to to New South Wales more so than is generally understood and I think the challenge for us in future is to make sure that we collectively play a role in ensuring that that future evolves into a continuing important future continuing important future in the future I think the other thing that was quite evident tonight is that the university's business plan I'd like to suggest through great foresight has anticipated some of the events and outcomes of the events more particularly that have taken place so we're in a very good position to fast start the second feature tonight is the obvious demonstration that cultural change is also taking place universities have got to be more responsive got to be more agile got to be more integrated with the community and I think tonight with the Jants presentation and our excellent panel that's for them on the question of the hydrogen economy in the future I'll just put in a plug that we anticipate that we will be able to have Australia's Chief Scientist Ellen Finkel come to us for another co-batch presentation early next year we'd hope to do that before the end of this year but circumstances have not allowed it so Janet to you and your panelists congratulations you both informed us enthusiasm you know caused us to be enthusiastic and also weathered our appetite in a number of these areas so well done very much Chancellor and really thank you to all of our guests tonight and thank you to all of you for joining we couldn't do it if we're not together in a partnership this is why I'm here this is what gets me up every morning and I'm looking to forward to some of the great things that we can do in the Hunter before we wrap up for this evening I just wanted to let you know that the fifth and final lecture in this series will be held on the 24th of November to let you know the title it's going to be titled we are talking the black lives still matter justice equity and education and this panel I hear is a fantastic panel it's going to be led by Nathan Towney our pvc indigenous strategy and leadership who opened uh and introduced anti allurel for us today and he's going to be bringing together a panel of local aboriginal members of our community and and university I think the discussion will be focusing on the role that we all have in in in effecting positive changes for the aboriginal peoples and communities I know I'll be tuned in and I invite you to join us as well thank you and have a wonderful evening