School Teacher’s day at University of Adelaide
The Waite node hosted 50 high school teachers today, all interested in learning more about biotechnology in agriculture. Alex and Ciara gave them an overview about what gene technology is, and the extent of it in Australia; Ben had the teachers popping embryos out of seed (the first step in plant transformation); Carrie had them doing mock transformations using the gene-gun; and Stu showed them our field robot and talked about the need for more software and mechanical engineers in Ag. We got some good discussions going both around the technology, how it gets delivered to growers and the opportunities for careers in this space.
School Teacher’s day at Australian National University
Caitlin Byrt hosted a group of 27 local ACT school teachers as part of the Science Educators Association of the ACT Professional Learning Master Class. Caitlin delivered a talk, they had a short tour of APPN and our lab, and some MeriSTEM activities.
They are here to learn about the cool science we do so they can tell all their students and we can have some great future plant science students!
UoA Open day
Stu and Bettina were at UoA Open Day, showing off their remote robot for phenotyping GMO plants at Rosedale. This one was bought using an ARC LIEF grant, which had CIs from the UoA and ANU nodes of Future Crops Development. The APPN will also start to deploy similar machines Australia for non-GMO trials based on learnings from this machine.