Director's Message

Dear Colleagues,

Firstly its my great pleasure to congratulate Prof Nanda Dasgupta and Prof Lan Fu, who have been elected as Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) in its 2026 cohort of new Fellows. Nanda, Director of the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, is recognised for her work advancing nuclear science, and Lan, Head of the Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, for her contributions to cutting-edge materials science. Their election reflects the impact of their research and the contribution of our researchers to addressing complex challenges through science and engineering. Congratulations to you both on this well-deserved recognition.

Last Wednesday we were pleased to welcome Prof Celine Boehm from the University of Sydney, who gave the Director's Colloquium on whether the LZ experiment has discovered a potential dark matter signal. Celine is an astroparticle physicist and it was great to hear her review the experimental strategies used to search for dark matter and the latest results from the LZ collaboration. As always, thank you to everyone who came along, and to those who helped organise the lecture.

This week's research highlight comes from Ziwei Yang, Dragomir Neshev and colleagues in the Department of Electronic Materials Engineering. Their new paper in Science Advances, a collaboration through TMOS, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems, with researchers at Nottingham Trent University and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, shows that light can be used to reprogram a metasurface after it has been made. By surrounding silicon nanostructures with liquid crystals, the team used the optical torque from a laser to shift the metasurface's resonance, with no electrodes needed. Most interesting of all, the same laser that generated visible light through third-harmonic generation could also tune how much light was produced, pointing towards reconfigurable components for optical neural networks, imaging and telecommunications. You can read more in the TMOS media release. Congratulations to Ziwei, who led this work as a PhD student, and to the whole team. If you would like your own work featured as a future research highlight, submissions can be made here, or feel free to email me directly.

Finally, a reminder that Founder's Day is on Friday 23 October. It is our annual celebration of the School's achievements and a chance to honour our Founder, Sir Mark Oliphant, and all are welcome. More details on the program will follow shortly including games and a trivia competition to be held in the afternoon! Start forming your teams of 6-8 now!

Jodie

2027 ANU Women and Non-Binary People in STEM Society!

The ANU Women and Non-Binary People in STEM Society aims to provide female, femme-aligned and non-binary STEM students at the ANU the opportunity to network with each other and other STEM professionals, improve their leadership skills, and meet others in their community in a safe and supportive environment. We aim to allow students to voice their experiences in STEM, connect with each other, and gain guidance on STEM pathways.

This flagship event is a three-day conference that aims to facilitate a positive, supportive, and educative community for Women and Non-Binary People in STEM, whilst also providing networking opportunities, skill development and insight from both academic and industry representatives. 

Position descriptions and further information can be found by following this link - https://forms.gle/JFoWEVagB1FWUUhaA

Applications close on the 20th of October. Applicants will be shortlisted, and short interviews will be conducted after the application close date. 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact wis.leadership@anu.edu.au.