Two QUT scientists, Distinguished Professor Dmitri Golberg and Professor Gene Tyson, have been elected Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science.
Professor Golberg, co-director of the QUT Centre for Materials Science and an ARC Laureate Fellow, is a world-leading physicist and materials scientist who uses state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to study and manipulate nanomaterials.
His research achievements are in two main areas: fabrication and microscopic analysis of nanomaterials, and development of new techniques for nanomaterial property exploration inside high-resolution TEM.
Professor Golberg’s scientific breakthroughs include his early research on boron nitride (BN) nanotubes, which have a mechanical strength about 30 times greater than steel. He was one of the first scientists to prepare these unique tubes and thoroughly analyse their structure in high-resolution TEM.
His work involves looking at objects down to the scale of the individual atoms, investigating the electrical, mechanical, thermal and optoelectronic properties of materials for smart integration into modern technologies.
In the electron microscope, he uses tiny tools to manipulate materials to better understand their properties on the nanoscale.
Professor Golberg’s current QUT research focuses on advanced one- and two-dimensional nanostructures, including some made of boron nitrides, metal carbides, sulphides and selenides which has resulted in dozens of articles in leading journals.
Professor Golberg has pioneered many original works, including the first-ever atomistic TEM studies of other exotic inorganic nanostructures such as nanotubes, nanowires, nanoparticles and nanosprings made of silicon, tungsten and molybdenum disulphides, superconducting magnesium diborides, and many other materials.
He and his colleagues fabricated unique carbon “nanothermometers” made of carbon nanotubes filled with liquid metals, which can precisely measure temperature in nanoscale-restricted environments.
After discovering how to fill nanotubes made of diverse materials with single crystals of functional metals, he produced novel nanocables for various nanotechnology applications.
Professor Golberg’s research thus has significant translational potential for many applications, and he and his colleagues have registered 85 Japanese and 37 international patents to date.
His expertise in nanomaterial synthesis and TEM research has seen more than 750 articles in top-ranked journals including Science, Advanced Materials, Nature Nanotechnology and Nature Communications.
Professor Golberg’s current QUT lab and former labs in Japan and Russia are closely connected and collaborate to perform joint synthetic and electron microscopy experiments and theoretical calculations. For example, his former “nanotube group” in Japan which he led for 15 years before joining QUT in 2017 was one of the top-ranked research groups in Japan and TEM laboratories in the world.
Professor Tyson is an internationally recognised authority on the development and application of meta-omic and bioinformatic approaches to understand complex microbial communities.
Professor Tyson led a landmark metagenomics study on the metabolic potential and population diversity of microbial communities involved in acid mine drainage generation during his doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley.
This demonstrated for the first time that metagenomic data could be used to reconstruct genomes directly from environmental samples. This work, published in Nature in 2004, has been cited more than 2,700 times and was recognised by Science as one of the Breakthroughs of the Year.
Since then, Professor Tyson’s work has continued to revolutionise how the structure and function of microbial communities are studied. This has forged the way for numerous important discoveries in microbiology and made significant contributions to the development of novel bioinformatic tools that have enabled the widespread adoption of meta-omics in microbiology.
Professor Tyson has also played a central role in expanding the genomic representation of many microbial bacterial and archaeal phyla by more than 30 per cent through the recovery of 8,000 microbial genomes from publicly available metagenomic datasets (Nature Microbiology, 2017).
Professor Tyson has helped secure more than AUD$60M since 2006 from domestic and international collaborative grant schemes. Through a Medical Research Future Fund grant he is applying innovative approaches in microbial cultivation to build the Australian Human Microbiome Biobank, a rich resource for research and commercial entities looking to develop microbiome-based health solutions.
He was also awarded $3.3M for the prestigious ARC Laureate Fellowship in 2023, an ARC Future Fellowship in 2018, a UQ Vice-Chancellor’s Research Focused Fellowship in 2016 and a Queen Elizabeth Fellowship 2010.
Professor Tyson has authored more than 148 peer-reviewed scientific papers and five book chapters. To date he has been cited nearly 39,000 times, putting him in the top 1 per cent of cited researchers in his field(s) globally.
Recognising the potential of microbiome research to improve human health, Professor Tyson co-founded Microba, an ASX-listed company focused on developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics from the human gut microbiome.
Media contact:
Rod Chester, 07 3138 9449, rod.chester@qut.edu.au
After hours: 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au
