2023 OzGrav Annual Report
The last seven years have been an amazing journey of scientific discovery. When OzGrav was first conceived, the first gravitational wave to be detected was still on its way to Earth, and mainly due to hard work but also a little luck it boomed into the LIGO detector in September 2015 and was announced to the world just prior to the interviews for the 2017 Centres of Excellence. The stroke of good fortune undoubtedly influenced the selection committee, but we’d assembled a great team ready to capitalise on the fertile ground that lay before us, and were awarded a 2017 Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence to pursue the discovery of gravitational waves…
2022 OzGrav Annual Report
Welcome to the sixth OzGrav annual report, summarising the Centre’s achievements in the past year.
2022 was very productive for our Centre, with our highest number of peer-reviewed publications to-date and our members receiving many prestigious awards in recognition of research excellence. We were also pleased with the progress made on several technology translation projects that were initiated within OzGrav, which I believe reflects a growing appetite for commercialisation and entrepreneurship that we have been actively cultivating in the Centre. On a personal note, I greatly enjoyed my visits to our nodes in 2022 after the hiatus COVID induced into our normal travel schedule since 2019. It’s far easier to get the vibe of a node in person than via (yet another) Zoom meeting and receive feedback on how we can improve…
2021 OzGrav Annual Report
Welcome to the fifth OzGrav annual report. As usual, it is a visual feast and provides a nice summary of the activities that we’ve been engaged in over the past year and nicely captures the vibe present across our nodes. I’m grateful to the admin team for all aspects of this year’s report, and to all our members for their achievements. Congratulations!
2020 OzGrav Annual Report
As Director, it brings me great pride to be able to present this, our fourth OzGrav annual report. Apart from the great productivity exhibited by our staff that his report presents – it looks absolutely stunning. At OzGrav I’m very blessed to have such reliable and professional support staff, led by my Chief Operating Officer Dr Yeshe Fenner whose team put together this artistic wonder (take a bow Carl Knox!). Centres of Excellence are a rare opportunity in our professional scientific careers to be able to lay down seven-year plans, build critical mass, and establish long-lasting collaborations and relationships that span the Centre nodes. One of the things that struck me about this report was images of the people of OzGrav, and their love for the science that they perform and explain to the general public through a range of outreach activities – and how much I’ve missed them in 2020…
2019 OzGrav Annual Report
In April 2019 the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors turned back on for the third observing run, “O3”, after an extended down-time for detector enhancements and we got to listen to more of the gravitational Universe than ever before thanks to the tireless work of OzGrav instrumentalists and our international colleagues. I was fortunate to be able to visit the Hanford detector for the first time in 2019 and the scale of these instruments has to be seen to be believed…
2018 OzGrav Annual Report
It never ceases to amaze me what a good investment in research the Australian Research Council’s Centres of Excellence are despite the large fraction of its budget they represent. 2018 was the first full year of OzGrav, and by the end of it, the full value of the Centre was clearly apparent. Centres drive collaboration instead of competition, Chief Investigators can concentrate more on performing science rather than grant preparation, and it is a joy for me as Director to host both the weekly video-conferences where we present our science and the annual retreat of our members that facilitate planning. Perhaps the most rewarding validation of our efforts come from our international colleagues, few of which benefit from equivalent programmes in their own countries but many of whom remark about OzGrav’s growing international presence and contributions to our field – and whether they can get an OzGrav hoodie!
2017 OzGrav Annual Report
In 1981 as a young undergraduate at the University of Adelaide, I would take great joy in perusing the books in the astrophysics section in the library. My favourite book, “Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars”, represented the intersection between science fiction and science fact. It described the then brand new field of relativistic astrophysics, driven by the first observations of neutron stars and black holes by the X-ray and radio telescopes of the 1960s and 70s. These instruments enabled the discovery of neutron stars and black holes, which had only been theoretical conjectures in the early 20th century. The popular science book was written in a manner which made these discoveries accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of high school physics, and I was hooked.