The Pearcey Foundation had a busy year in 2020. Highlights include our National and State Awards, the Pearcey Oration and our monthly "Conversations" webinars on many areas important to Australia's ICT policy, heritage, and innovations.
This is a remarkable book. It is frank, insightful and at times hard hitting.
It traces the life, loves and career path, in UK and Australia, of a courageous and very competent woman from the earliest days of the computer age, through to the current times.
Nobody much remembers it now, but 40 years ago Australia built one of the world’s largest computer networks. In 1981 Australia’s Department of Social Security (DSS) began planning an ambitious network to connect all of its 210 Australian offices in real time.
Sydney Uni's Nano Centre in Department of Physics was awarded the 2020 Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in protecting Australia. By harnessing the delicate interaction between light and sound, Professor Ben Eggleton and his team have produced a microchip that provides a unique advantage for defence platforms.
Dr Cathy Foley AO, currently CSIRO Chief Scientist, and from December 2020, will become Chief Scientist of Australia. Cathy has made distinguished contributions to the understanding of superconducting materials and to the development of devices using superconductors for a number of applications including to detect magnetic fields and locate valuable deposits of minerals.
Recognising the amazing contributions of female Australians to the digital age. Held on Ada Lovelace Day and supported by the Tech Girls Movement Foundation.
So you’ve decided to become an IT professional when you grow up? Good choice! You’ve already discovered the satisfaction of getting a program to work – that will continue to excite you for the rest of your life. You’ll also find that debugging the things that don’t work is equally rewarding.
This is an extract from Ann Moffatt’s book, The IT Girl, which is to be published in November 2020.
This graduation season, we are proud to announce that Skaidrite Darius has received an honorary doctorate from the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science.
From the start she thrived on this new technology that used abstract logic, and still relishes looking back at those early,
adventurous days with all card systems and low-level programming languages.
Following the invention and development of the transistor in the late1940’s in the USA, the CSIRO began research into semiconductors.
