Tiffany Walsh delivers ICT for Life Sciences Forum

veski innovation fellow Associate Professor Tiffany Walsh delivered an ICT for Life Sciences Forum on Wednesday, 16 October answering the question: Can we be smarter than a coccolithophore?

A coccolithophore is a single-celled marine flagellate that secretes a calcareous shell, forming an important constituent of the phytoplankton.

Tiffany reminded the leading scientists, researchers and students in attendance that high-performance materials are found everywhere in Nature. She said these materials have incredible properties that typically cannot be reproduced in the lab with synthetic materials, and are usually formed in water, under ambient conditions – the ultimate in “green fabrication”.

Tiffany provided a fascinating insight into her research that continues to explore how Nature achieves these incredible manufacturing results. Tiffany reviewed this fascinating world of Nature’s advanced materials, and highlighted how, with a body of research spanning around a century, we still have much to learn from these systems.

An additional focus of her presentation was the future directions in harnessing Nature’s rules for designing synthetic materials with novel properties, that can beneficially impact on advances in technology, healthcare, energy and interpreting our cultural heritage.

Watch the presentation below:

Established in 2008, the ICT for Life Sciences Forum is an initiative of like-minded organisations in Melbourne, Australia, committed to bringing together researchers with an interest in the opportunities for innovation and research offered by the new biology.