Nerd Nite Melbourne celebrates our one year anniversary and as our birthday present to you Nerds, we are giving you free entry to the event! But you will have to be quick as there are limited number of tickets we can give away, before we reach capacity.
To help us celebrate our first birthday, we have three brilliant speakers lined up. More details below. Our friends at Mr Wow’s Emporium will be hosting us again to dish out birthday food, birthday cocktails, birthday hats and birthday balloons! You get the birthday idea…
Nerd Nite – Birthday Bonanza!
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
at Mr Wow’s Emporium
97b Smith Street, Fitzroy
Doors 7pm FREE BIRTHDAY ENTRY!
Back to the lectures at hand:
*Presentation 1
Why is Smith Street important? A history of one of Melbourne most diverse streets
by Dr Craig Bellamy
Description: Smith Street is one of Melbourne’s oldest, most eccentric, and more interesting thoroughfares dating back to the first suburban land subdivision in Melbourne in 1838. It forms the eastern border of Fitzroy, Melbourne’s first suburb, and the western border of Collingwood. It was originally a winding dirt track that went to Heidelberg, being the only road out of the City to the North. In Victorian times it was one the busiest and most important shopping centres in the Australian colonies, until it went into decline in the 1970s. From the labyrinthine Foy and Gibson’s, one of the world’s largest and most eclectic department stores, to secret tunnels for ‘’women shoppers’’, to the first Coles store in Australia, to a long history of struggle between rich and poor, Smith Street is an significant route for urban Australian experience.
Bio: Dr Craig Bellamy is an historian and long-time resident of Fitzroy. He hold PhD in history and currently specialises in digital technologies in the humanities. He is one of the founders of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities and has worked at King’s College London, and the University of Virginia. And in 2005, penned the ‘official’ history of the Melbourne Moomba Festival!
*Presentation 2
Researchers: weathering the data avalanche with MyTardis
by Steve Androulakis
Description: MyTardis was invented at Monash University to solve the problem of archiving and making large amounts of research data available worldwide. It’s function as an automated pipeline of data from instruments such as those at the Australian Synchrotron has seen its data hosted and cited in journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Plos One and many more. MyTardis believes that data should be a first class citizen, and the full story behind a discovery should be available. This ethos has seen it applied to many disciplines outside protein crystallography, such as microscopy, gene sequencing, proteomics, and neutron-based sciences.
Bio: Steve Androulakis was the original developer and ‘benevolent dictator’ of the open source codebase, and now manages Monash University’s bioinformatics platform. He’ll outline some common problems researchers face in working with raw data and current progress in solving them.
*Presentation 3
Beginners guide to making a vaccine
by Dr Kylie Quinn
Description: An essential but often lacking skill in this modern erais the know-how for whipping up a vaccine. Kylie will provide a crash course in the components that you will need to make your very own vaccine; including case studies of vaccines that have ended plagues, vaccines that continue to contain infections, and vaccines that we very much hope will provide protection against the most frightening of modern infections.
Bio: Dr Kylie Quinn cannot teach you French or help youfix your carburetor but, damn, can she make a vaccine. She spent her PhD at the Malaghan Institute in New Zealand trying to make the TB vaccine a little less rubbish. She then spent 5 years at the National Institutes of Health in the USA working on vaccines that are in trials for HIV, Malaria and Ebola. Back over this side of the world, she is at the University of Melbourne working on vaccine solutions tailored to the needs of the elderly. Your Nana would love her.