Changing lives together: from water to astronomy to cancer, this collection showcases outstanding collaborations
between French and Australian researchers.
Scientific collaboration between Australia and France stretches back to the early days of European settlement, when La Pérouse built an observatory at Botany Bay in 1788.
A century later, Louis Pasteur’s nephew Adrien Loir came to fight Australia’s rabbit plague with chicken cholera. Though it didn’t work out, he stayed in Sydney for years producing anthrax vaccine for cattle.
More recently, Australian geophysicist Kurt Lambeck played a key role in the establishment of the French satellite program and unravelled the mysteries of the Earth’s changing shape.
Today, hundreds of collaborations between French and Australian researchers are happening at any time, in fields from fundamental physics to high-tech manufacturing to environmental protection.
Stories of French-Australian Innovation gives a taste of these projects.
Stories include:
- Finding hope for coral reefs in New Caledonia with the Institut de recherche pour le developpement (IRD) and University of Technology Sydney
- Mission design at rocket speed at a centre created by the Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES) and the University of New South Wales
- Cellular factories engineered to make medicines and sensors, with the University of Adelaide and the Pasteur Institute
- Changing how communities think about water from Kiribati to the Kimberley with researchers from the Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement et l’agriculture (IRSTEA), the Australian National University, and more
- Wheat that’s good for guts: CSIRO and Limagrain Céréales
- Making light work to build better sensors and faster data transmitters and enable sharper MRI scans at ALPhFA, the Associated Laboratory for Photonics between France and Australia
- Plus: L’Astrolabe opens up Antarctica; discovering our changing planet; cooking with a hydrogen-powered barbeque; peptides to fight pain; balloons over the Red Centre for a view of the Milky Way; and cancer, maths, and evolution.
View all stories as a PDF.