May 15, 2026
Most face-to-face events and all online events conducted by the Royal Society of New South Wales are recorded and made available for subsequent viewing on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/royalsocnsw.
Most recently, at the 1340th Ordinary General Meeting held online, Professor Jeffrey Reimers FRSN FAA FRACI, Director of the International Centre for Quantum and Molecular Structure at Shanghai University and Adjunct Fellow in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, spoke on ‘Household Electricity Use and Investment‘ from a consumer perspective, based on his experience of recently renovating his inner-Sydney terrace house.
In April, at the 1339th Ordinary General Meeting held on 8 April 2026 in the State Library of NSW, scientific futurist, Dr Catherine Ball, and Simon Masters, Deputy Director of the InnovateUK Future Flight program, spoke on the topic of ‘A drone by any other name‘, discussing the innovation of drone technology in Australia and the United Kingdom, and the challenges of scaling and regulating the technology in both countries.
Back in March, the recordings of four events were uploaded to YouTube. The first of these was (offline) recordings of presentations by the winners of the RSNSW 2025 Postgraduate Student and Early Career Award Winners, who spoke at a presentation ceremony at the University of Sydney on 9 March 2026. A few days later, Lieutenant General Susan Coyle AM CSC DSM, Chief of Joint Capabilities in the Australian Defence Force, and the incoming Chief of Army, spoke on the critical topic of ‘Navigating Strategic Uncertainty: Space, Cyber and National Support in a Fractured World.’
At the Hunter Branch, on 19 March 2026, Professor Sarah Brough FRSN, Head of the School of Physics at UNSW Sydney, spoke on ‘Observing the Faint Universe with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time‘, to be undertaken using the very high resolution (3.2 gigapixel) camera at the at the Vera C Rubin Observatory (formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)), located in Chile. Then, on 25 March 2026, Professor Zahid Islam FRSN, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Business, Justice, and Behavioural Sciences at Charles Sturt University, addressed ‘The illusion of friendship: Why generative AI demands unprecedented ethical vigilance.‘
Finally, we highlight that our year of events commenced on 11 February 2026, when Dr Abul Rizvi PSM FRSN, a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and now a prominent media commentator, addressed the thorny topic on immigration in a talk titled ”How many Australians should there be?‘
If you missed any of these presentations, you can catch up on our YouTube Channel or through the links below.
