Clunies Ross

The 2013 ATSE Clunies Ross Award Winners follow in the footsteps of past winners such as Ian Frazer, inventor of the cervical cancer vaccine; Nobel laureate Barry Marshall, who discovered the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers; Fiona Wood, inventor of spray-on skin; and Martin Green and Stuart Wenham, international leaders in silicon cell technology.

Australia’s Anzac frigates are being upgraded with Ian Croser’s radar technology to defend themselves against missiles. Credit: Australian Defence Department

Under every ocean, crossing every mountain

Our connected lives depend on reliable global communication carried by a net of undersea glass cables.

And in those cables are technologies developed by Simon Poole and Steven Frisken. Simon and Steven are Australia’s most successful commercialisers of new technologies that have shaped the internet worldwide including key components of the Australia’s National Broadband Network.

Their products, including undersea communication systems, are sold to all the major telecommunications equipment manufacturers in Europe, the United States, Japan and China, and have generated exports worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their factory in Sydney.

The tests we need to eradicate TB

Anthony Radford, James Rothel, Paul Wood and Stephen Jones have fundamentally changed the way tuberculosis is diagnosed around the world, by inventing and commercialising revolutionary technology that is greatly assisting in global TB control in both humans and cattle.

They played a role in successfully eradicating bovine TB in Australia.

Protecting ships

“Floating targets”, said a junior defence minister of Australia’s Anzac frigates back in 1998. This year one of those frigates, HMAS Perth, intercepted a missile travelling three times the speed of sound in trials off Hawaii. The frigate now has one of the best small warship defence systems in the world.

At the heart of the system is a digital phased-array radar technology developed by Ian Croser of CEA Technologies. The system looks 60 km in all directions and can track multiple threats.

In 1982 Croser and his colleague David Gaul left the Australian Navy and founded CEA Technologies. Now employing over 270 employees, it is Australia’s largest majority owned defence company, making advanced radar and communications solutions for civil and military applications.

Photo: Australia’s Anzac frigates are being upgraded with Ian Croser’s radar technology to defend themselves against missiles.
Credit: Australian Defence Department