Rotary Melbourne Weekly Club Meeting - 5 March 2025

Guest Speaker Professor Alan Duffy, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Flagship Initiatives at Swinburne University of Technology

Topic 'Australia Exploring our Moon'

Details 12.30 for 12.50 - 2.00pm at No35 Sofitel Melbourne & by ZOOM

Venue No35 Sofitel Melbourne

As Pro-Vice Chancellor of Flagship Initiatives at Swinburne University of Technology, Professor Duffy brings together diverse research teams with industry and government stakeholders to undertake transformative programmes in Flagship sectors of hydrogen, renewable technologies, AI, space and aerospace, MedTech and health innovation.

He was the inaugural Director of the Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne, finding ways to use space and AI to help companies and communities on Earth. His research background in computational astrophysics saw Alan model universes on supercomputers to understand how galaxies like our Milky Way form within vast clouds of dark matter. He is trying to find this dark matter as a Chief Investigator in the $35M ARC CoE for Dark Matter Particle Physics and SABRE, the world’s first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory at the bottom of an active gold mine in Victoria. Alan is also the co-founder and CEO of mDetect, a spin-off company from his dark matter research that uses particles from space to scan and identify structural weaknesses in tailings dams, as well as national education programs that allow students to access the highest energy particles in the universe with hands-on experiments entirely safely.

Synopsis

Australia is now exploring the final frontier with an established space agency, growing space industry and a commitment to supporting NASA’s Artemis mission to see the first woman walk on the Moon and then beyond to Mars. This new space era looks very different to Apollo, and is as much between startups as superpowers. What is Australia’s place in space, what we have achieved and the challenges we aim to overcome in communications, next-generation satellites, and even mining the resources of the Moon itself. Some exciting efforts at Swinburne bring the educational opportunities of space to classrooms nationwide, including missions to the space station and explorations of the highest energy particles in the universe.