Royal Society of NSW Meeting Presentations

Since 2020, almost all of the Society's meetings, either face-to-face or online, have been recorded and made available on our YouTube channel.  This page provides access to such content, where permission to do so has been granted by the author(s), and is made available under either a Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence or a standard YouTube licence unless otherwise stated.  It includes video and audio presentations (with links to  YouTube) and slides (in pdf format) presented at Society meetings, where these are of general interest.

This page lists the content for 2023 and 2024. 

Content from earlier years can be found in the following archive pages for 2020,  2021,   2022.

2024

2023

This page provides access to reports on events/meetings hosted by the Hunter Branch of the Royal Society of NSW.

2020 Activities

• October 2020: Report from the Hunter Branch — Event and Committee Activities 
• January 2020: Report of the January 2020 Meeting — Speaker: Professor Ryan Loxton (Curtin University)

Report on the 2018 Royal Society of NSW Liversidge Lecture — Scientia Professor Martina Stenzel

The 2018 Liversidge Lecture of the Royal Society of NSW was delivered at UNSW Sydney on the evening of Thursday, 20 February 2020 by Scientia Professor Martina Stenzel FAA of the UNSW School of Chemistry. Professor Stenzel was introduced by Professor Emma Johnston AO FTSE FRSN, Dean of Science at UNSW, and Emeritus Professor Ian Sloan AO FAA FRSN, President of the Royal Society of NSW, who spoke about the Society and of the prominent role played in its early history by Professor Archibald Liversidge, whose bequest founded the Liversidge Medal and Lecture which is awarded biennially. The 2018 awardee, Professor Martina Stenzel, then presented a fascinating story – a story with two strands.

The first reflected on her own professional journey from early school days in Germany through a succession of university studies, ending up as a post-doctoral researcher at UNSW two decades ago, from which time it has been a continuous success story, up to her present position as a Scientia Professor, with numerous awards along the way. The other strand was the story of the development of polymers, long rows of linked organic molecules, which started with a challenge, in the 1860’s, to make synthetic billiard balls as a replacement for ivory balls. However, the winner, who pocketed $10,000 in prize money, had little idea of what was taking place in the mixture of materials he had come up with in a cut-and-try process, and it was not until 1920 that the theoretical foundations of polymerisation were established.

There followed the development of numerous materials through polymerisation, which we know under the collective term of “plastics” today, but in these materials the length of polymers would vary immensely, from a few hundred to a hundred thousand of the organic building blocks, whereas the polymers found in Nature (and there are many of them) all have very definite lengths. Through studying them, it was found that by adding a certain type of molecule to the polymerising mixture, the length could be controlled reasonably accurately. With this, the basis was established for Martina’s main interest – the creation of nano-sized polymers with various shapes, one of which is a sphere or ball, with a core of hydrophobic material and an outer shell of hydrophilic material. As cancer drugs are mostly hydrophobic, they can be embedded in the core, and by attaching particular molecules to the polymers making up the shell, the nanoparticles will attach themselves predominantly to cancer cells, penetrate the cells, and release the drug.

The whole story, from billiard ball to cancer delivery, had the appearance of a fairy-tale – every time a problem blocked further progress a solution was miraculously found – but it was, of course, no fairy-tale; it was the story of a huge amount of hard work and dedication. And, above all, as Martina emphasised several times, it was the result of collaboration between disciplines – physics, chemistry, biology, and also medicine – and she summed up the moral of the story with “A successful team is better than a team of successful people”.

Royal Society of NSW and the Learned Academies Forums

This page provides access to the abstracts, content, and reports from the annual Forum that is conducted jointly by the Royal Society of NSW and the Learned Academies at Government House, Sydney.

Please follow the links below to the content that is available. Video recordings of all Forums from 2019 onwards are available on the Society's YouTube channel.

• 2023 Forum: Our 21st Century Brain
• 2022 Forum: Reshaping Australia—Communities in Action
• 2021 Forum: Power and Peril of the Digital Age
• 2020 Forum: After COVID-19: Creating the Best of Times from the Worst of Times
• 2019 Forum: Making SPACE for Australia
• 2018 Forum: Towards a prosperous and sustainable Australia: what now for the lucky country?
• 2017 Forum: The Future of Reason in a Post-Truth World
• 2016 Forum: Society as a complex system—implications for science, practice, and policy
• 2015 Forum: The future of work