In 2019, Jean-Pierre Macquart came home, had dinner with his wife and put his kids to bed.
From that small glimpse into his life, you might not guess that, earlier in the day, he had solved a decades-old mystery about the cosmos.
With colleagues at CSIRO, the Curtin University astronomer used a massive radio telescope array in Western Australia to discover where the universe’s missing matter was hiding. The discovery was hailed as “stunning” and “huge” by his peers.
Just last week, Richard Scolyer and Georgina Long were announced as 2024’s Australians of the Year for their work, which has saved thousands of lives with a revolutionary approach to treating advanced melanoma.
They are now developing an experimental treatment for Professor Scolyer’s incurable brain cancer.
Science changes our view of life and our nation, and Australia punches above its weight, says Robyn Williams, host of ABC’s The Science Show.
Science is very rarely a solo endeavour. It involves diverse teams collaborating to solve problems, building on the research of scientists who came before them.
Mr Williams is quick to point out his list doesn’t rank scientists like triple j’s Hottest 100, and it is “just a draft” to spark conversations. He wants the ABC audience to add more.
So, here are the stories of just 11 scientists who’ve changed our understanding of the world we live in (some from Mr Williams’ list and some we’ve added ourselves) to get you started.
Jean-Pierre Macquart
Cosmologist who shed light on our universe
The mystery of the universe’s missing matter has long haunted scientists.
About 95 per cent of the universe is made of matter we can’t see, so-called dark matter and dark energy. The other 5 per cent is ordinary (or baryonic) matter – the stuff we can see and feel. The stuff that makes us.
But we couldn’t really even find half of that until Curtin University’s Professor Macquart — J-P to those who knew him — and a team of international astronomers detected a stream of unusual signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs).
These signals, which are believed to be generated by the highly magnetised corpses of distant stars, can be detected as they zip across the universe by radio telescopes.
Using the ASKAP telescope in outback Western Australia, J-P and his team studied FRB signals in fine detail – and lurking in that data was a clue that the missing matter was exactly where we expected it to be: hiding in the vast spaces between galaxies.
The discovery was published in the prestigious journal Nature in 2020.
Sadly, however, J-P suddenly died two weeks later at the age of 45. He is remembered as “an exceptional young scientist with an incisive and inquiring mind”.
Image: ICRAR
Tom Rich and Pat Vickers-Rich
Palaeontology duo who discovered Dinosaur Cove
Tucked along a stretch of the Great Ocean Road lies Dinosaur Cove, a rugged shoreline that has proven to hold unfathomable prehistoric riches.
Between 1984 and 1994, palaeontology duo Tom Rich and Pat Vickers-Rich excavated about 600 tonnes of rock at the site, uncovering a treasure trove of fossils.
Some 100 million years ago, the region was situated over the South Pole and, though global temperatures were higher at the time, any dinosaurs that called it home would have still experienced cold temperatures. The fossils found at Dinosaur Cove came to be known as the “polar dinosaurs of Australia”.
During the decade of digging at the site, the duo and some 700 volunteer excavators and students helped uncover some of the secrets of the polar dinosaurs, including possible signs that they were warm-blooded.
Dr Rich is now the senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria while Dr Vickers-Rich holds a position as emeritus professor at Monash University.
And the fossils recovered from the site continue to provide palaeontological riches – just last year, scientists confirmed that 107-million-year-old fossils at the site belonged to the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs.
Image: supplied Pat Vickers-Rich
Akshay Venkatesh
“Nobel Prize of mathematics” winner
Akshay Venkatesh’s life is all about numbers.
At 2, he moved from Delhi, India to Perth. At 12, he won the physics and maths Olympiads. At 13, he enrolled in an honours course at the University of Western Australia for mathematics.
And in 2018, at 36, he was awarded the Fields Medal – one of the highest honours bestowed upon a mathematician (there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics). It was just the second time an Australian had been awarded the honour, after Terence Tao won the award in 2006.
Professor Venkatesh’s achievements in mathematics have been across many different fields, including number theory — a branch of maths concerned with the relationships between numbers.
The technical complexities of Venkatesh’s work defy easy explanation although they’re often summed up with deceptively short titles: L-functions, the Hasse principle, the Langlands program. Along with his collaborators, he has helped uncover the unexpected and developed techniques that explain mathematical phenomena.
In 2018, in an interview with Quanta Magazine, he mused that the genius myth “doesn’t capture all the different kinds of ways people contribute to mathematics” and suggested awards “tend to reinforce the myth of the lone genius.”
Today, he is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Image: Dan Komoda/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ USA
Fiona Wood
Burns doctor and co-inventor of “spray-on skin”
Fiona Wood’s name has become synonymous with a 1,000-kilogram bomb – but for the right reasons.
In October 2002, that bomb exploded in Bali’s Sari Club, killing 202 people and injuring 209. Professor Wood’s “spray-on skin” technology, developed with scientist Marie Stoner, was deployed to help heal those wounded.
Though there was some controversy about its rollout and trials, it worked remarkably well. Taking a patch of healthy skin from a patient, growing those cells in culture and then spraying them over a wound seemed to help more than the traditional method. It also reduced the time taken to grow new skin cells.
Of 28 people treated by Wood after the bombings in 2002, more than 20 healed within three weeks.
Professor Wood’s achievements saw her named the 2005 Australian of the Year and made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2024. The Perth-based plastic surgeon is currently director of the Burns Service of Western Australia.
Image: UWA
Howard Florey
The Aussie behind the first antibiotics
You might not expect that one of Australia’s Nobel Laureates (we have 15, for reference, though a couple might be claimed by other nations too) would find themselves on a list about under-appreciated scientists.
But Howard Florey, awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945, does.
Alongside Alexander Fleming and Ernst B. Chain, Florey helped produce and distribute the life-saving antibiotic penicillin which, depending on which estimates you look at, saved upward of 80 million lives. Perhaps that number goes as high as 400 million.
For someone who made such a world-changing impact, it seems Florey’s legacy is somewhat fading from view.
Robyn Williams, who counts Dr Florey among his list of top scientists, points to a 2021 episode of the Science Show that showed even students at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at Australian National University (ANU) – a school established by Dr Florey and containing his bust in the foyer – struggle to recall his achievements.
Image: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Lesley Hughes
Ecologist keeping watch on our warming world
Lesley Hughes has described getting into climate change research as being like the Eagles’ Hotel California: You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Professor Hughes is one of the more recognisable names in climate change, but she got her start working on ants. It wasn’t until a PhD supervisor suggested climate change might be worth studying in the 1990s that she switched.
One of her most cited publications reviewed the biological consequences of a warming world – all the way back in 2000. It showed long-term monitoring data had already revealed how climate change was altering the planet.
Since then, she’s helped author two assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, won the Eureka Prize for Promoting the Understanding of Science, is a director of the World Wildlife Fund Australia and has written extensively on the impacts, politics and challenges of climate change.
She recently joined the government’s Climate Change Authority, a body established to give advice on policy. She’s the only climate scientist involved.
Today, she is a professor emerita in biology and pro-chancellor of Macquarie University.
Image: Chris Stacey / Macquarie University
Adele K Morrison
Oceanographer unravelling the secrets of the south
In humanity’s effort to combat climate change, we have one massive ally: the Southern Ocean.
The deep blue sea surrounding Antarctica is an important region that absorbs an extraordinary amount of heat. Its complex circulation and the winds that rip across it help mix in that heat.
But, as we pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the climate warms, this is changing.
In 2022, Dr Morrison, an oceanographer at the Australian National University, was awarded the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year.
With colleagues, her work attempts to understand how the Southern Ocean and Antarctic ice sheets are changing, and how this might contribute to future sea level rise.
Their latest research suggests Antarctic meltwater may be changing the rate of deep ocean overturning, threatening ocean ecosystems and sending more heat toward Antarctica — which could in turn accelerate sea-level rise.
Image: Tracey Nearmy/ANU
Lisa Jackson Pulver
First Nations professor of medicine and public health advocate
Lisa Jackson Pulver slept in cars and couch-surfed throughout her teen years before turning her attention to nursing.
The Wiradjuri Koori woman worked for decades in that profession, then she applied for the University of Sydney’s medical program. Professor Pulver became the first Indigenous person to receive a PhD in medicine from the university.
That PhD, examining the lack of appropriate care given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia, informed the next phases of her career and helped her to become a fierce advocate for First Nations health research.
Her epidemiological research, which has been used by the World Health Organization, identified the wide array of health problems still affecting Indigenous Australians and ways to address inequities.
Her philanthropic contributions to several universities have built scholarship programmes providing opportunities for First Nations students.
She is currently deputy vice chancellor of Indigenous strategy and services at the University of Sydney.
Image: Q+A
David Flannery
Planetary scientist building robots to send to Mars
On the wall in David Flannery’s office is a gigantic map. But it’s not the map you might expect.
There are no towns; no city lights. Certainly no oceans, rivers or streams. This map is a map of Jezero Crater – on Mars.
Dr Flannery is a planetary scientist from the Queensland University of Technology and a principal investigator on NASA’s Perseverance mission. That mission landed a rover (and helicopter) in Jezero Crater in 2021 and it has been rolling around the red planet’s surface ever since.
Dr Flannery is one of the science team leads, interested in understanding if Jezero Crater contains evidence of past habitability. In short, he helps the NASA team make decisions about which rocks the rover should investigate and analyse in an attempt to answer a major question: Did life once exist on Mars?
Image: supplied David Flannery
Helen O’Connell
Women’s health doctor who rewrote what we know about the clitoris
In 1998, Helen O’Connell rewrote the world’s anatomical text books.
The Melbourne urologist’s study of the clitoris is one of those rare science accomplishments that deserves the word “groundbreaking”, as it completely changed how the organ was viewed.
That study, published in the Journal of Urology, examined the relationship between the urethra and clitoris and concluded that our understanding of female genital anatomy is inaccurate and incomplete.
Not only has she contributed to a better understanding of the clitoris, but she’s been a pioneer in treatments for conditions of the urinary tract, bladder and prostate.
Her recent publications show O’Connell is not done – a November 2022 study highlights that, despite her own contributions to our understanding of the clitoris, accurate representation is still lacking in medical and surgical textbooks.
Image: photograph by Emilia Predebon, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed
The Science Show would like to hear suggestions for more fantastic Australian scientists who deserve better recognition. Drop them a line at the 100scientists project.
