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Gravity waves, epigenetics win top Australian science prize - Sydney Morning Herald

Gravity waves, epigenetics win top Australian science prize - Sydney Morning Herald

Gravity waves, epigenetics win top Australian science prize - Sydney Morning Herald
Oct 28, 2020 1 min, 6 secs

When Professor Susan Scott was a physics student, the general thinking among scientists was discovering gravitational waves was next to impossible.

“Einstein himself really thought there wasn’t a hope in hell of anyone detecting gravitational waves, given how small their amplitude was,” Professor Scott said.

On Wednesday night, Professor Scott and three other Australian physicists won the $250,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science for helping to prove they exist.

Professor Scott, Emeritus Professor David Blair, Professor David McClelland and Professor Peter Veitch have worked closely together for almost a quarter of a century as leading members of OzGrav, a team of researchers in Australia who work closely with LIGO's detectors in the US.

Professor Blair developed ways of filtering out interference caused by sound waves.

Professor McClelland filtered out the popcorn-crackle of quantum interference.

And Professor Scott builds mathematical models that unlock the next phase of gravitational wave astronomy: working out what extraordinary and violent event elsewhere in the universe generated the waves.

Emeritus Professor David Blair, Professor David McClelland, Professor Susan Scott and Professor Peter Veitch.

Professor Mark Dawson, associate director of research translation at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, was awarded the $50,000 Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year for his work on epigenetics – the machinery that switches our genes on and off.

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