Science Academy bestows honour on UOW academic

Mar 23, 2007

The Australian Academy of Science has announced that Professor Gordon Wallace will join an elite group of scientists in the country to be awarded a Fellowship of the Academy.

Election to the Academy recognises a career that has significantly advanced, and continues to advance, the world’s scientific knowledge.

It was only last year that Professor Wallace, the Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Electromaterials, was honoured with UOW’s first-ever Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship to develop a nanobionics research base.

Nanobionics is the merging of biology and electronics using recent advances in nanotechnology.

[Nanotechnology is simply the building of devices that are 1-100 nanometre in size – one nanometre is a billionth of a metre, so nano-scale devices are composed of just a handful of atoms/molecules].

Established under the Australian Government’s 2001 innovation action plan, Backing Australia’s Ability, the ARC’s Federation Fellowships are highly prestigious awards designed to develop and retain Australian skills.

Federation Fellowships provide opportunities for outstanding Australian researchers to return to, or remain in, key positions in Australia. Up to 25 Federation Fellowships with a standard tenure of five years are available each year.

Now Professor Wallace will be formally admitted as a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science at the annual 'Science at the Shine Dome' in Canberra in the first week of May.