|
UNSW Medicine Newsletter - 4 February 2009
General News
Research News
Student Administration News
IT News
Library News
Current Events
General News |
New contact in UNSW Media Unit
Steve Offner is the Faculty's new contact in the UNSW Media Unit. Steve can be contacted on 9385 8107 or . If you have any research in press, which would be of interest to a general audience please don't hesitate to contact Steve.
Suzi Hamilton is now Editor of Uniken. We thank Suzi for all her great work in getting our stories written and published.
|
Research News |
Biological Resources Update
Animal Care and Ethics Course
An Introduction to the Ethical & Scientific Issues - February 17-19, 2009 Rm 204 Wallace Wurth. This course is compulsory for all researchers conducting animal research at UNSW who have not previously attended this course. Inquiries can be directed to Aruna Lobo at the Ethics Secretariat on 9385 4234.
Should researchers have students commencing after this course, Biological Resources Staff will provide basic animal handling training by arrangement, subject to the student’s compulsory attendance at the next available course.
Seminar Invitation to all biomedical researchers from the Department of Primary Industries
A seminar featuring Dr Clément Gauthier, Executive Director of the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), is to be held on Monday 23rd February, 200pm - 4.00pm (see details below in the Animal Welfare Branch Circular)
Renovations/Refurbishment Wallace Wurth
Due to a range of problems, compounded by the major works also being undertaken in Wallace Wurth, renovations to both lower ground and the roof of Wallace Wurth are taking much longer than expected. The two-week lead time for orders will need to be strictly enforced to ensure that we are able to make the best possible arrangements for both animals and researchers. Your patience is much appreciated during this difficult time.
For further information contact our Office: 9385 8456 Fax: 9385 8457 or email
Animal Welfare Branch Circular
Seminar Invitation
A seminar featuring Dr Clément Gauthier, Executive Director of the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), is to be held on Monday 23rd February, 200pm - 4.00pm at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick.
The CCAC is a national organisation involving over 2,000 scientists, veterinarians, animal care staff, students and representatives from the public and animal welfare movement. The CCAC is responsible for setting and maintaining standards for the care and use of animals in science in Canada. It does this via its guidelines and policies as well as carrying out assessment visits. The CCAC is recognised as having pioneered institutional animal care committees as the keystone of its oversight system. The CCAC oversees the system at the national level.
Dr Gauthier has been Executive Director of the CCAC since 1999 and is responsible for the overall management of the CCAC budget and personnel and for identifying the most effective means to achieve universal application of CCAC guidelines and programs.
Dr Gauthier will give a presentation on “The Roles of Institutional Animal Care Committees”. There will be time for audience questions and comments after his address.
Would you please circulate this invitation to AEC members and executive, animal care staff and researchers/teachers.
There is no charge for attendance.
Date: 23rd February 2009
Time: 2.00pm - 4.00pm
Presenter: Dr Clément Gauthier
Topic: The Roles of Institutional Animal Care Committees
Venue: John Dwyer Lecture Theatre, Edmund Blacket Building, Prince of Wales Hospital, Cnr Avoca and High Streets, Randwick NSW 2031 - Map
Parking is available in the hospital (entrance off Barker street) for a fee, or in the shopping complex off Avoca Street.
To assist with organisation, if you are intending to attend, please RSVP to:
Ms Janelle Townsend, Clerical Officer, Animal Welfare Branch, NSW Department of Primary Industries
Ph: (02) 9527 8433, Fax: (02) 9527 8409, Email: janelle.townsend@dpi.nsw.gov.au
Animal Ethics Dilemma Website
A website of interest is Animal Ethics Dilemma at: http://ae.imcode.com/en/1001
The website is designed as an interactive learning tool, allowing exploration of ethical views and how they may influence decisions and behaviour related to animals.
NewSouth Innovations News
Happy New Year and welcome back from NewSouth Innovations
I will kick start the New Year with a brief review of the achievements for 2008.
The main goals for commercialisation of medical research at UNSW for 2008 were raising awareness among Faculty members of the importance and potential value of IP protection, and increasing the number of invention disclosures made to NewSouth Innovations. The latter goal is one of the major key performance indicators of the commercial output from research activities for universities, with the number of notifications expected to be directly proportional to the amount of research funding received.
Based on the volume of grants received, the Faculty of Medicine is expected to generate the highest number of notifications relative to other major faculties at UNSW. In 2008 we came closer to achieving that status, with a total of 22 notifications, up from 14 in 2007 and 12 in 2006. The Faculty’s overall rank is second behind the Faculty of Engineering, with 46 notifications, but represents an improvement from third position in 2007. Although we have made some major strides we are a long way off from where we should be, which is about 60 notifications per year. Nonetheless, the achievements to date reflect everybody’s commitment to continuous improvement, and in particular the support we have received from Peter Smith, Denis Wakefield and the Heads of Schools.
In 2009 we will continue to raise the bar with ever-stretching goals for the number of disclosures, revenue generation through licensing deals and raising the Faculty’s external profile. I am working closely with Denis Wakefield to introduce a new initiative to further increase the number of notifications to NewSouth Innovations, which we will publish in the March newsletter. Other initiatives include, induction training for honours and graduate students, an IP training workshop and sponsorship of a Research Day Technology Prize. I welcome any suggestions that you may have for achieving these goals, and the opportunity to meet with you, your research team or school in 2009.
Please continue to direct any enquires to myself.
Laura Issa
Business Development Manager – Faculty of Medicine
NewSouth Innovations
HP Labs Innovation Research Program 2009
The HP Labs Innovation Research Program is designed to create opportunities - at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world - for breakthrough collaborative research with HP. Through this open Call for Proposals, we are soliciting your best ideas on a range of compelling topics with the goal of establishing new research collaborations.
Program guidelines and research topics are provided on the website. http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/
Program Awards
Awards under the 2009 HP Labs Innovation Research Program are primarily intended to provide financial support for a graduate student to assist the Principal Investigator conducting a collaborative research project with HP Labs. Consequently, awards will provide cash support for one year in the range of USD $50,000 to $75,000, including any overhead. Larger or partial awards may be made, and awards may be renewed for a total project duration of up to three years, based on research outcomes and HP business needs. Supported projects will be expected to begin in August 2009.
HP Labs anticipates that award recipients and their graduate-student researchers will be invited to an HP Labs Open Innovation Summit planned for late 2009.
Important Dates
Monday, 2 March 2009, 5:00 PM: Deadline for submissions
Wednesday, 22 April 2009: Notification of award decisions begins
|
Student Administration News |
2008 Higher Degree Postgraduate Research Completion Bonuses for Supervisors
Supervisors whose postgraduate research students from the Faculty of Medicine submitted theses in 2008 will be contacted (via email) in mid-February 2009 about registering for bonus payments.
Please note that bonuses will not be automatically paid out for all thesis-submissions; conditions apply.
If you are a supervisor whose Medicine postgraduate research student submitted a thesis in the calendar year of 2008, please contact Petrina Choong at
|
IT News |
Changes to teaching PC labs
The labs that are in-scope for this project are all the Scenario Group Rooms, Wallace Wurth G2/G4 , 106, 107, 108, the new 110, M210, 202/204; Samuels Museum G05 and Student PCs on level 3 (and St Vincents Walter McGrath Library may also be included).
I am writing to inform you about two significant changes these teaching PC labs and, if you teach in these labs, to ask you to be involved in some testing to ensure they will be ready for the start of session 1.
These changes are part of the UNSW IT Change Program and will act as a pilot project for the rest of Medicine.
1. Individual Logins for lab PCs
The first and most visible change is that we will be moving to individual logins for all the labs listed above. This login will be a new UNSW account that will primarily be supported by the ServiceDesk and will be used for a range of new cross-campus shared IT services. This account will eventually replace or be tightly synchronized with the Unipass account that we are familiar with (it is not Unipass) and like Unipass will be based on our staff/student number (but will have a Z prefix for all, staff and students). The current name for this account is zPass.
We understand that this will be a major change to the lab environments which have historically used the generic “medstudent” and similar accounts. Medicine IT will work closely with the ServiceDesk and the IT Change Program to support the initial transition to zPass to minimise the impact on teaching activities, particularly in the first couple of weeks. I will be sending you more information on this soon.
Initially the students will be able to use zPass to login to any PCs in Medicine labs. Over the following months and into next year this account will give them access to a greater range of machines on campus and to a file directory service (that has both class and personal folders) and better access to cross campus print services. zPass is already being used in a range of sites on campus and has been well supported through the ServiceDesk. I am confident that it will not be overly complex for the students to cope with a new login.
For staff members who teach in these labs and SG rooms, we anticipate using a combination of zPass and some emergency generic accounts in the first half of the year (for the lectern machines).
As the campus becomes more engaged with the IT Change Program we will start moving Medicine staff members onto the new UNSW Desktop services and the new staff shared file/print/email systems. At the moment, I see this happening in the second half of the year and so consider this lab project to be a pilot for the full staff services in Medicine.
For this reason, it will make sense for those of us who use the teaching labs regularly to use zPass from the start, as these accounts will end up being our primary logins on our staff machines also. For visiting staff, and staff who use the labs only infrequently, we will make some emergency accounts available.
As our staff move onto the new shared services we will be able to access our file shares and other shared resources from any of the teaching machines just by logging on. Moving some key teaching staff onto zPass for the lab environment early on will help us better understand how to transition the rest of the us later this year.
2. Lab PCs to use New Desktop Management Tool
The other, less visible, change is that the lab PCs themselves will be configured and supported in a new way.
We will be using a new Desktop Management Tool and cross-campus lab support processes to deploy applications and, when needed, rebuild the PCs. We are confident that this will make it much easier to quickly install new applications on request onto the lab machines and also help us to more easily support these machines remotely.
This is also a pilot of how well this tool will be able to be used to support our staff machines when we move staff to the new UNSW shared IT services later this year.
3. Rebuilding and Testing the changes
As a result of these changes we are going to be rebuilding our base configuration for the lab computers over the next few weeks.
We will try to ensure that the new build is as similar as possible with the same base set of applications and class menus.
If you are involved in teaching in the labs I would like you to take a moment and think through how you use the teaching labs.
What applications do you use regularly? Have you contacted us in the past to fix/customize/modify any of the applications you use. Please do not assume that we will have remembered all of these changes so if you have any special requirements for your applications then contact me with your requirements.
The main area that we are currently concerned about is applications with specialized hardware requirement (eg: data acquisition cards) and some of the custom/specialized software that we use.
I will also be asking some of you to be formally involved in some User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of the new lab machines. Noted in the application list below are those we still need help testing. However, I would encourage any of you that are involved in teaching in the labs to familiarize yourselves with the new setup before session starts.
Please send me an email if you want to be involved in testing your applications or if you think you will want a zPass account.
If you have any other questions about this project then please contact Luc Betbeder directly.
Project updates including the application list will be on:
http://mcsu.med.unsw.edu.au/MCSUWeb.nsf/page/Lab%20Update%202009
SPSS17 - viewing previous versions
SPSS 17 doesn't read output files from previous versions of SPSS. You will need to download the SPSS Smartviewer. If you need assistance please contact the IT Service Desk (servicedesk@unsw.edu.au or 9385 1333).
SPSS Training - Statistical Methods for Health Care Research
Due to popular demand SPSS have scheduled an additional evening training course in "Statistical Methods for Health Care Research".
Classes are: 6pm – 9pm Wednesdays, 11 Feb – 8 April (no class 11 March).
More information
Email: autraining@spss.com
Web: http://www.spss.com/au/training/2009courses/healthcare.htm
Or complete the Booking Form and fax to 02-9492-2343
http://www.spss.com/au/pdf/BookingForm.pdf
|
Library News |
Library Refurbishment
A major building project is underway to improve the overall quality of the Library's physical spaces.
For details see:
http://info.library.unsw.edu.au/libadmin/about/MainLibraryBuildingProjectA4.pdf
http://info.library.unsw.edu.au/libadmin/about/libraryupdate112008.pdf
Access to the material that is currently on Level 4 (Dewey range 220-510 which includes Public Health) will be compromised from the beginning of March and although every effort will be made to provide a stack service to it, it is advisable that academics inform the library of their content requirements prior to that date so that material can be set aside prior to the work commencing on this floor.
For further information please contact the Faculty's Outreach Librarian Kate Dunn ( or (02) 9385 8241)
|
Current Events |
|
Keep in touch with faculty news and events on our website. If you have an upcoming event or story please submit it for display.
http://www.med.unsw.edu.au/medweb.nsf/page/News+and+Events (Staff ID and UniPass required to submit)
If you have any research in press, which would be of interest to a general audience, please contact Steve Offner in the Media unit at UNSW on 9385 8107 or
To promote events via the UNSW website and to approx 22,000 subscribers, please complete the form at: http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/newEventsGeneral.html
|
 |
|
|
|