News & events
News
Konzo is a neurological disease that causes irreversible paralysis of the legs, often in women and young children. It's caused by malnutrition and consumption of high levels of a cyanide compound found in the cassava plant - which happens to be a common staple food in tropical Africa.
On Monday, 28 November, Emeritus Professor Howard Bradbury passed away.
Howard worked tirelessly to translate science into effective actions to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. His passion, humour and determination inspired many of us and one of his greatest wishes was to see that work to prevent konzo continue. We will do our best to honour his legacy.
Howard Bradbury followed in his father’s footsteps. “Dad was a chemist and he used to keep telling me stories about it all the time. I couldn’t understand what he said, but somehow something just rubbed off and so I always thought science would be real fun, so I just went into it. I must say I’ve enjoyed every minute."
Tackling one of tropical Africa's crippling epidemic diseases has been an interesting and demanding retirement project, as HOWARD BRADBURY AM writes. Through our work, konzo has now been prevented in 16 villages, which has involved more than 10,000 people.
Events
In this talk, I introduce how white-winged choughs, highly social cooperative breeders, integrate multiple features of alarm and contact communication to coordinate antipredator behaviour and maintain cohesion.
Developmental conditions are powerful drivers of phenotypic plasticity. Environmental factors, such as temperature, can directly program fitness-associated phenotypes, while maternal effects act as indirect cues that shape the developmental environment.
Using Eucalypts representing widely contrasting range sizes and home climates across Australia, I explore whether greater geographic distribution size or climate of origin are associated with the ability of these plants to acclimate their photosynthetic and respiratory apparatus or heat tolerance thresholds.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used across fields as diverse as ecology, archaeology, epidemiology, and conservation biology.
The majority of studies into the Australian orchid flora and associated funga have thus far been narrow in scope and focused either on a macro- or microevolutionary scale. In this thesis, I studied the Australian terrestrial orchid flora and its associated funga as a unified system spanning from the macro to microevolutionary scale.
Plants synthesize an amazing diversity of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that facilitate interactions with their environment, ranging from attracting pollinators and seed dispersers to protecting themselves from pathogens, parasites, and herbivores.