Innovation & Future Industries: Careers Forum
Details
Year Level: 8–12
Cost: Free to all schools
This is a careers forum with purpose. Each semester, Science Gallery Melbourne will introduce your students to inspiring people who work to solve some of our most pressing global and local challenges that we as a community face.
Students will hear not only about career journeys and industry connections, but how these professionals work across science, technology, engineering, arts and maths and use a range of transferable skills in the ways they work to make a difference in the world.
Connected with the DARK MATTERS exhibition, in this special Australian National Science Week Edition, we will focus on transdisciplinary careers relating to innovation and future industries. We have panellists from the Australia Space Agency, Adobe India, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics and more.
Register for you and your students below to watch the recorded session in class time.
Panellists
Professor Elisabetta Barberio is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics and initiated the underground direct detection dark matter program in Australia, which led to the construction of the first underground laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere, the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) in Victoria. SUPL will host the SABRE South experiment, the first underground Australian dark matter direct detection experiment led by her. She had an important role in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider. Professor Barberio was a researcher at CERN, the European laboratory of Particle Physics, where she performed measurements that confirmed the theory describing fundamental particles behaviour to an extraordinary degree of precision.
Harshit Agrawal is an Indian artist working with emerging technologies, primarily artificial intelligence. His practice is centered around the theme of exploring the poetics of technology. He is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab (USA) and IIT Guwahati and has carried out various international art residencies. Along with his art practice, he has authored several publications and patents about his work at the intersection of human computer interaction and creative expression.
Rishi Kher is an entrepreneur working across industries such as health, manufacturing, finance, technology and education. He is currently CEO of health and cosmetic manufacturing and retail company Holy Sanity. He runs his own accounting practise providing outsourced CFO work and more recently built and is operating a school in rural India with his involvement in the charity Schoolgoers. He previously ran and assisted companies through the cryptocurrency boom for many exciting block-chain start ups and was awarded the IABCA Young Professional of the Year in 2022.
Shirley Zhang is the Defence Engineering Engagement Lead at the Australian Space Agency (ASA). My primary responsibility is to manage cross-government partnerships in national space projects to realise government’s full capabilities in growing our local space industry. I am also a Satellite System Engineer. I served as the Ground & Control Lead at Defence prior to this role and worked in Defence as an engineer since 2014. My academic background was in Computer Science and Network Engineering, with a specialisation in Software-Defined Network.
As the Lead Community Engagement Officer for CH4 Global, Tiahni Adamson is part of a dynamic team that research and foster sustainable seaweed aquaculture, with a goal of zero methane agriculture. As a Torres Strait Islander woman descended from the Kaurareg Nations of Thursday Island, and Wildlife Conservation Biologist, Tiahni works diligently on a variety of external projects to nurture country, find solutions to our climate crisis and advocate for First Nations justice and land rights.
Emcee
Dr Jess Vovers (they/them) is a maker, potter, secret poet and doctor of biochemical engineering. Outside of their research in sustainable extraction of pharmaceuticals from plant matter, Jess is a scifi-fantasy dork nerd who is passionate about diversity and creativity in STEM. They seek to explore the plurality of queer, neurodiverse, regenerative futures and how we can enmesh art and science to cultivate them. Jess is also a hair model, avid meditator, experienced speaker, and Leonardo for Science Gallery Melbourne. They are propelled by curiosity, awe and connection, and can often be found settling in with clay in soft coloured lighting, or wandering along the Birrarung with a thermos of tea searching for mushrooms and fluid dynamic patterns.
