July 2024
Welcome to your latest edition of Endpoint. I start my report with a heavy heart, acknowledging the sudden and untimely passing of Michael Warne earlier this year. A much loved member of the SETAC AU community, his sustained contributions to the fields of ecotoxicology and environmental risk assessment since the Australasian Society of Ecotoxicology was first formed in 1994 will be his enduring legacy. He is a former President of our Society and in 2020 his long-term contributions to SETAC were recognised with him being awarded the SETAC Asia-Pacific Lifetime Achievement Award. Members of the SETAC community has kindly put together a short obituary on Michael’s stellar life and career.
Science meets Parliament (SmP) took place in March, with SETAC sending two delegates: Prof. Oliver Jones (RMIT University) and Dr Shima Ziajahromi (Griffith University). The 2024 event was the largest one to date, with over 360 delegates and more than 90 parliamentarians, including Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic and Australia’s Chief Scientist, Cathy Foley. For more details about this event, be sure to check out Oli Jones’ report.
Congratulations to all of our award winners for 2024. The Mid-Career Medal, which is awarded in recognition of excellence or service to environmental chemistry and toxicology in Australasia, over the past 10 years was won by Dr David Beale (CSIRO). The judging panel were impressed with his scientific contributions over the last ten years, including the applied nature of the research that successfully translates science into informing management and policy to improve our environment.
Another award that has just been announced is the 2024 SETAC AU Postgraduate Research Publication Award. We receive several high quality applications every year for this award, and im pleased to announce the winner for 2024 is Lorenzo Ricolfi (UNSW). His winning publication, “Maternal transfer of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in wild birds: A systematic review and meta-analysis” was published in Chemosphere. Well done to all the Postgraduate students that submitted entries for this award, it is so great to see such a high standard of publications being produced by our student members.
The closing dates for two more awards, The SETAC AU and ACEDD Peter Teasdale Memorial Award and the SETAC AU Technical Staff Award are fast approaching, so make sure you get in quick if either of these awards apply to you. I encourage all our members to consider applying for or nominating someone else for one of the many awards and prizes we offer throughout the year.
We are making progress on the review of our governance arrangements to update our structure to be better aligned with other similar Australian professional associations, and to ensure our governance and legal responsibilities are up to date with current Australian corporation laws. We are in the final stages of reviewing documents with some legal assistance and are on track to have this completed before the end of the year. At that time, we will dissolve the current Council, and hold elections to establish a new Board of Directors and multiple sub-committees (i.e. membership, finance and risk, indigenous engagement, policy). Keep an eye out for email updates from me as we get closer to the time when we will be finalising the restructure.
2024 SETAC Asia-Pacific Conference, 21-25 September, Tianjin, China
The 14th biennial SETAC AP Conference, in Tianjin, China is just around the corner, taking place 21-25th September 2024. The theme is “Promoting a Healthy Earth” with conference co-chairs Hongwen Sun and Lingyan Zhu of Nankai University, China. The program contains a great line up of leading researchers, scientists, and industry experts from around the globe, who will share the latest advancements and promote knowledge exchange in the fields of environmental science and toxicology. Confirmed plenary speakers include: Sebastian Bocker (Freidrich Schiller University Jena, Germany); Beate Escher (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Germany); Giubin Jiang (Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Science, China); Jenny Stauber (La Trobe University, Australia); Edward Topp (University of Burgundy, France); Hiroshi Yamamoto (National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan); and Yongguan Zhu (Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Science, China). There will also be a Special Session on the Establishment of a Science-Policy Panel for Pollution Prevention with Michelle Bloor leading the session along with other members of the SETAC Advisory Panel on Chemicals Management (CheM). There is still time to register, so head to the conference website for further details.
EMERGING CONTAMINANTS WORKSHOP 2024 (UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, ALEC LAB)
The annual Emerging Contaminants Workshop (ECW) is set to take place on August 14 at University of Melbourne and SETAC AU are pleased to be sponsoring this event again. This year the event will again run as a hybrid workshop with options for attending in person, or online via Zoom. The theme is “Pollution and Health” and make sure you mention you are a SETAC member (Explorer or Full) when you register to receive a discount on your ticket cost.
WHAT’S IN OUR WATER 2024
Planning is well underway for the next What’s In Our Water (WiOW) symposium, which will take place at the Black Mountain Discovery Centre in Canberra 29-31 Oct 2024. The theme is “restoring water health through knowledge-based solutions” and will be co-chaired by Anu Kumar, Louis Tremblay and Glen Walker. The website is now live and the program is starting to take shape, with a number of local and international thought leaders and keynote speakers locked in. Registrations have already opened, and the call for abstracts has been extended to July 15th – so get in quick!
ALGA (NZ) 2024 – with SETAC AU Special Sessions
The Australasian Land & Groundwater Association (ALGA) is holding a conference, ''Emerging Frontiers: Navigating Risk, Innovation and Sustainability'' from 22-24 October is Auckland. SETAC AU are partnering with ALGA for some special sessions at this conference: “Plastics: Macro to Micro, Challenges and Solutions”; and “Relevance of the ANZG Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality to New Zealand, with cross linkage to the NPS-FM”. For more details, see the conference website.
SETAC AUSTRALASIA 2025
We are very excited to confirm that our biennial SETAC AU conference will be taking place in Wellington (New Zealand) in 2025! Eugene Georgiades (NZ EPA) and team are well underway with the planning of this event, so keep an eye out for more details about this event coming soon.
SETAC MEMBERSHIP
A reminder to everyone that SETAC now offers three levels of membership: Free, Explorer and Full, and membership fees vary based on student and income status (high, low-middle) of the country registered in. For all of us residing in the Asia Pacific region, membership payments are made in Australian dollars. An important point to keep in mind when renewing your membership is that to receive benefits such as discounted conference registrations and eligibility for awards and prizes or to join Council, you need to be a Full member (not Free or Explorer), and membership needs to be on-going for more than one year.