The task of rehousing dogs from an animal shelter in Wagga Wagga is being made a little easier with the help of veterinary science students at Charles Sturt University (CSU). The students were on hand at the re-opening of Wagga Wagga City Council’s renovated Glenfield Road Animal Shelter in July. There they conducted pre-health checks on the dogs ahead of their transfer by Animal Ambulance to the Veterinary Clinical Centre at CSU’s Wagga Wagga Campus. Under supervision, the fourth year students will spey the dogs and de-worm and vaccinate them against major infectious diseases on Tuesday 29 July and Wednesday 30 July. “Through this valuable work, the students are being taught the principles of anaesthetics and surgery,” said head of Small Animal Surgery at the CSU Veterinary Clinical Centre, Professor Bruce Christie. “These principles can then be generically understood and applied to other animals during surgery.” The dogs have been or will be rehoused through the Council’s animal shelter.

With a significant percentage of stroke victims left with speech and language impairments, Charles Sturt University’s (CSU) speech pathology course is training a new generation of therapists to ensure that the focus is always on getting people back to the activities that are important to them. Lecturer at CSU’s School of Community Health, Ms Libby Clark, believes that rehabilitation after stroke is something that should not stop at the hospital door. “It needs to reach right back to the community level to support people who have strokes to get back into the everyday activities that give their lives meaning,” she says. “The CSU program strongly emphasises the social aspects of health to students. This teaches them to think beyond what the person can’t do, and to think about what the person can do, and what everyday activities are important to the person. Our students get very practical, hands-on experience during the four year course, with a real emphasis on working in partnership with the client and their families.”

Charles Sturt University (CSU) academics have moved into their new ‘green home’ as part of the next phase of the University’s $40 million building program at Thurgoona. The building will initially house over 20 academic, research and general staff from the new School of Business and Information Technology (SBIT). It includes a ground-breaking material which helps regulate temperatures inside buildings to reduce the need for air conditioning. Developed by German-based industrial chemical company BASF, the building material is in the form of special plaster boards and flooring screed. This material includes small granules of a waxlike material that liquefies at higher temperatures, increasing its capacity to absorb heat from surrounding air. The building also includes other energy saving and environmentally friendly features such as double glazed windows, good use of daylight to reduce the need for office lighting, rainwater collection for flushing toilets, an automated building management system to control ventilation and temperature, and roof funnels for purging hot air from the building at night. The University is awaiting final notification of the ‘green star’ rating of the building with the Green Building Council of Australia.

On World Heart Day, Sunday 28 September, health researchers from Charles Sturt University (CSU) are calling for more university-based health clinics in rural areas based on research recently conducted in rural south-eastern NSW and north-eastern Victoria. The research has discovered diabetes complications, such as cardiovascular disease, contribute to morbidity and mortality even before diabetes has been diagnosed. CSU diabetes expert Dr Herbert Jelinek is part of a research team investigating how diabetes associated with atherosclerosis, a disease affecting arterial blood vessels, affects the autonomic nervous system and leads to disturbed heart rhythms. “Hypertension is a major risk factor for coronary heart disease and is estimated to cause 4.5 per cent of current global disease burden,” Dr Jelinek says. “Early identification of those with higher risk of autonomic nervous system dysfunction, can reduce casualties of severe cardiovascular disease.”

Two Charles Sturt University (CSU) business students will take their university education to China in 2009 after each won a $5 000 scholarship allowing them to study at a Chinese university for one semester. Wodonga’s Mr Brenton Olsen and Mr Cobie Butler from Albury are currently enrolled in international business management degrees with CSU’s School of Business and Information Technology, based at Thurgoona. Both have been selected for their academic records and their representative skills to attend a Chinese university in partnership with CSU. While there, the students will undertake intensive training in Business Chinese that will be credited to their CSU degree in international business management. Mr Olsen said, “The chance to learn Mandarin and to have an understanding of Chinese culture, society and business practices will be invaluable in my future career.” Previous participants in the program have returned to China after completing their degrees, including Mr Angus Coghlan from Gerogery who is currently based in Shanghai in a management position with a global logistics firm. Both students leave for China in February 2009.

Charles Sturt University (CSU) education student and future teacher Ms Rebekah Salvaire was on a holiday with a difference when she travelled recently to Korea as part of her studies with the University’s Murray School of Education. With assistance from CSU, the final year student realised her goal to visit and work in Korea, while learning more about herself. “I learnt so much about my own culture by being removed from it. It made me realise how much my culture impacts on who I am. I am now studying subjects back here in Australia that requires me to reflect on the privileges of my culture and identity. My overseas experience has shaped and grown me – it was not just a holiday." CSU education lecturer Ms Sharon Milsome led the group of eight students to South Korea for four weeks, which included a teaching practicum in an international school. “We were completely immersed in Korean culture with lectures on its history, language, economy and business, cuisine and culture.” Twelve students will gain further international experience in October when they travel to the Pacific Island country of Vanuatu to teach for one week in local primary schools.

Combining her studies with two jobs, family responsibilities and community service work is part of the juggling act Mrs Jill Morris has successfully performed for a number years. Mrs Morris, from Dubbo in the NSW central west, was named in September as the NSW Vocational Student of the Year at the NSW State Training Awards, hosted by the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET). Mrs Morris is benefiting from a joint program introduced by Charles Sturt University (CSU) and the TAFE NSW Western Institute in 2005. Students enrol at the two institutions and begin their social work studies in three courses at the same time, including the CSU Bachelor of Social Work. As part of her CSU degree, Mrs Morris has this month started her work placement in oncology at Dubbo Base Hospital. “The TAFE/CSU initiative has offered me an opportunity to study at a level that I would not have considered without the joint venture,” said Mrs Morris. “Jill’s success in her studies demonstrates the success that many social work students achieve when they return to learning with a wealth of personal, family and community life experiences,” said Mr Neil Barber, lecturer in the CSU School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Wagga Wagga.

A Charles Sturt University (CSU) researcher who is investigating the long term sustainability of the iconic Murray crayfish in NSW and Victoria will present a talk at the Wonga Wetlands on the Murray River near Albury on Friday 3 October. Ms Sylvia Zukowski will speak about the habitat, diet, location and possible reasons for the declining population of the crayfish. The second largest fresh water crayfish in the world (after the Tasmanian crayfish), it lives in the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers and their tributaries, but is no longer found downstream from Mildura. Sylvia is completing a PhD on the ecological and social impacts of fresh water fishing regulations on Murray crayfish, through CSU’s Institute for Land, Water and Society and is supervised by well known aquatic scientist Associate Professor Robyn Watts and social researcher Professor Allan Curtis.

One of the few women to research and write on the dynamics between the media and the military, Charles Sturt University’s (CSU) Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration), Professor Lyn Gorman, will speak at the Chief of Army’s annual Military History Conference in Canberra on Thursday 9 October. Professor Gorman, has a special interest in the Cold War. She will present a paper entitled The Cold War: An Australian Perspective in which she argues that, contrary to the view that the Korean War was ‘the forgotten war‘, Australian media did provide coverage of this 1950s conflict, and in the case of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, they provided more critical and thorough coverage of the war and Australian involvement in it than has been generally believed. “My research found considerable critical and careful reporting of both wars, which goes against the common assumption that the wars were either largely ignored or that the coverage lacked independence,” Professor Gorman says. “New technologies such as video phones and YouTube, have continued to change the way that war is reported.”