Keynote speakers
Peter Doherty
Professor Doherty is an Australian researcher in the field of medicine, particularly the immune system. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, and in 1996 he and Rolf M. Zinkernagel were co-recipients of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on T cells.
Professor Doherty was named Australian of the Year in 1997 and currently spends three months of the year conducting research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. For the other nine months of the year he works at the University of Melbourne.
We have invited Professor Doherty to speak because he understands the importance of communication in the fields of science and education and because he is himself a wonderful communicator.
In Professor Doherty's autobiography, published on the Nobel Prize website, he states:
My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity, and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me. I was influenced early on by reading Arthur Koestler and Edward de Bono, and more recently by the writings of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. My research career has been highly unconventional … Intellectually, I march to the beat of my own drum and have little interest in competing in ‘races’.
Saul Eslake
Commuting the ‘death sentence’: The role of editors in the Australian economy
Open the PDF [72kB] or read in HTML.
Saul began his career as an economist in the Commonwealth Public Service, including two years at the Treasury in Canberra. Prior to joining ANZ, he was Chief Economist (International) at National Mutual Funds Management and, before that, Chief Economist of the stockbroking firm McIntosh Securities.
He has a first class honours degree in Economics from the University of Tasmania, and in 2003 he completed the Senior Executive Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in New York.
Saul is currently on the Boards of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the University of Tasmania Foundation. He chairs the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board. He is also a member of three Federal Government advisory panels – the WTO (World Trade Organization) Advisory Group, the Trade Policy Advisory Council, and the Foreign Affairs Council.
Saul is a skilful communicator in an often difficult and abstruse field. We approached him because of experience in the world of corporate and public-sector economics, and his chairmanship of the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board.
Ramona Koval
Ramona Koval is well known in the Australian literary world through her long history as an ABC Radio presenter and participant in literary festivals here and overseas. She presents The Book Show on ABC Radio National, which was established in 2006 as a daily literary program, now podcast through the internet to listeners around the world. Before that she presented the Books and Writing program since 1994, and is herself a writer. Over the past three years, her interviews at the Edinburgh International Book Festival have made for compulsive listening.
Ramona has served on the Board of Australian Book Review, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award Advisory Committee, and the Asialink Awards Literary Committee. She has judged the radio section of the Walkley Awards twice, and been a judge of non-fiction for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards twice, once as Chair of the Committee. She was for four years the staff-elected Director of the ABC. Her interviews are regularly published in transcript in international publications.
All this, plus a personal background in science, means Ramona will bring a unique point of view to the conference and its themes.
Yvonne Rolzhausen
Yvonne Rolzhausen is a senior editor with The Atlantic magazine in the United States. A graduate of Tufts University, she has been with The Atlantic for 15 years. Starting out as a fiction intern, she soon moved to the fact-checking department, which she now heads. The magazine has just moved from Boston to Washington DC where Yvonne has been training new editorial staff.
Yvonne will address the conference on the magazine’s efforts in trying to be accurate, trying to get it right, and the obvious pitfalls in that pursuit. She will include discussion of the magazine’s three-part series on Ground Zero New York, ‘the unsentimental vision of the 'unbuilding' of the World Trade Centre’, by William Langewiesche that became a best-selling book.
Yvonne also participated in a public forum and presented a practical workshop on fact-checking, a critical process in publishing that editors, writers and students will find invaluable. For more information about the Atlantic, visit the magazine's website: www.theatlantic.com
The Atlantic is currently celebrating a major anniversary. The magazine was founded in 1857 as ‘a journal of American politics, art and literature’ by a group of Boston intellectuals lead by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now in its 150th year, the magazine says: ‘At a time when sound bites and headline summaries have become the normal news digest for so many Americans, The Atlantic takes time to explore the biggest issues and the smallest pleasures. It is, as it was in the beginning, a magazine for thinking people – an ever-evolving conversation on what it means to be American and what it means to be human.’
