Charles Sturt University (CSU) will hold three graduation ceremonies in Albury from Thursday morning, 22 April, with 730 graduates eligible to receive their doctorates, degrees, diplomas and certificates from CSU Chancellor Lawrie Willett, AO.

 

Highlighting the growing importance of research on the Albury-Wodonga Campus, this year 10 Doctors of Philosophy will be awarded to researchers from the Faculties of Science and Education.

Dates and times:
Thursday 22 April, starting 10.30am – Faculty of Science, School of Community Health
Thursday 22 April, starting 2.30pm – Faculties of Business and Arts
Friday 23 April, starting 10.30am – Faculty of Science, School of Environmental Sciences and Faculty of Education, Murray School of Education

 

Venue: Albury Entertainment Centre, Swift Street, Albury 

 

Thursday morning – National sports scientist, Professor Richard Telford, AM

Thursday afternoon – Prominent Albury businessman, Mr Bill Hanrahan

Friday morning – Leading educational researcher, Professor Sue Dockett. [Click here to see Professor Dockett's speech.]

 

Stories of interest at the ceremonies include:

 

Groundbreaking sports scientist addresses Albury graduation (Thursday morning)
Occasional speaker for the Thursday morning ceremony, Professor Richard Telford, AM is Australia's first full-time sports scientist and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Sports Medicine Federation. He has been an adviser, coach and consultant to Sheffield Shield cricket teams, AFL football teams and Olympic athletes in various sports. He is the former head of the Department of Physiology / Applied Nutrition and the principal research scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, and is currently the High Performance Coach in Long Distance Running for Athletics Australia, together with an adjunct professional post at Griffith University.

 

A CSU researcher has found that speech pathology services for people following stroke are not all created equal. Dr Michelle Smith-Tamaray, who will receive her PhD during the Thursday morning ceremony, investigated how rural speech pathologists provide services to people with swallowing difficulties following a stroke, and how this service compared with nationally recognised guidelines. Her research highlighted that some patients might not get the best service based on where they live and what’s available. Dr Smith-Tamaray stressed the challenges clinicians faced and their good work in providing services under these difficult conditions. The research has local, national and international implications for providing speech pathology services in remote and rural areas. Originally from Sydney, Dr Smith-Tamaray completed her degree at The University of Sydney in 1999, and commenced her PhD at CSU in 2003, “because of the University’s focus on rural health issues”. She has worked as a clinician in Shepparton and Wangaratta in regional Victoria and now works as a lecturer in the School of Community Health.

 

Mr Viengxay Photakoun will return from the Laos People’s Democratic Republic in South East Asia to receive his Master of Philosophy from CSU in Albury-Wodonga for his research into evaluating the effectiveness of training livestock extension officers across various livestock projects in the northern provinces of Laos. The results will assist the Lao government and NGOs in designing appropriate training and on-the-job learning opportunities for staff who work with farmers. Mr Photakoun, who is supervised by Dr Joanne Millar and Dr Digby Race in the Institute of Land, Water and Society, will be living in Albury for the next month to finish academic papers to explain his work to peers worldwide.

 

As part of the research for her PhD with CSU, Dr Anna Burns has shown the much maligned native mistletoe to be an important oasis for biodiversity in the Australian bush. Dr Burns conducted the first ever detailed study of the insects and other invertebrates that live in mistletoe clumps compared to the mistletoes' host plants. She also used new statistical methods to measure how insect fauna changes with geographic distance.  Dr Burns particularly studied two groups of insects - small sap-sucking bugs called lerps and spiders that preyed on them - and found that lerps specialised on mistletoes or the host Eucalyptus trees, while spiders were not so choosy. Dr Burns also discovered two previously unknown spiders, hinting at the undiscovered wealth of animals associated with mistletoes and their host gum trees.