March 9, 2023

1st Annual Symposium held for the Steel Research Hub

The Steel Research Hub held its 1st Annual Symposium last month on the 20 – 21 February. The Symposium took place at the University of Wollongong (UOW), hosting over 80 members from our partner universities and industries, as well as UOW research personnel.  
As this was the first symposium held under the current Hub, the overarching theme of the event centred around collaboration, engagement, and cohesiveness, which ultimately saw a large amount of the Hub’s community meeting for the first-time face to face.  It was truly a “gathering”!

The first day of the symposium provided an in-depth overview of the current Hub and covered key topics such as intellectual property and commercialisation (presented by members of the Hub’s Translation and Commercialisation Committee), as well as individual presentations by program teams, which detailed project activities and expected impacts and highlights. 

A panel session with researchers from the previous Hub (Hub 1) was also conducted, which consisted of a mix of Postdoctoral Research Fellows and PhD candidates. The aim of this session was to try and provide personal insight into topics such as lessons learnt, commencing research, career advancement, and any tips to success, in the hope of helping any new researchers working under the current Hub.

Guest speaker Hannah Gee from Nue21 kicked off proceedings on the second day, delivering a presentation on innovation and how to be solutions oriented. Dr Paul Zulli (Hub Director), then provided detailed information on key aspects of the Hub’s Strategic Plan, covering issues such as publications, mentoring and workshops. Program teams then broke off to spend the remainder of the event collaborating on their individual projects and specific outcomes. 

Overall, the 1st Annual Steel Research Hub Symposium was an enormous success and helped to lay the foundation of what’s ahead for the Hub. We would like to thank everyone who helped to organise the event and for all those who attended across the two days. The Hub is proud to be working with such a talented pool of academics, researchers, and industry engineers and scientists - we can’t wait to hear about all the achievements to come.