Bulletin

Issue: September 2004

People

New Professors lead research in Microbiology and Theatre

La Trobe University has appointed two new professors. They are Dr Paul Fisher, Professor of Microbiology, and Dr Peta Tait, Professor of Theatre and Drama.

Professor Paul Fisher is Head of the Department of Microbiology and runs La Trobe University's Microbial Cell Biology Laboratory. His main research interest is the molecular genetics of signalling pathways in the cellular slime mould, Dictyostelium discoideum.

Found in soil and leaf litter, Dictyostelium is one of the few non-mammalian model organisms recognised by the US National Institutes of Health for their importance in biomedical research.

Professor Fisher's research group is probing the way the organisms behave, having discovered these behaviours are highly sensitive to genetic defects affecting the Dictyostelium's mitochondria - tiny energy centres also found in human cells. This work is important because human mitochondrial diseases, which result in a wide range of neuro-muscular disability, might be partially explained by defects in signalling pathways.

Professor Fisher holds a BSc (Hons) and MSc from the University of Queensland and a PhD from the Australian National University. A Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Biochemie in Germany where he taught students from the University of Tübingen, he taught at the University of Queensland and the ANU, before joining La Trobe in 1985. Since then, he has held posts as Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institut; at the University of Leiden, Netherlands; and has worked in Australia as part of the Cooperative Research Centre for Diagnostic Technologies.

A member of the Australian Society for Microbiology, the Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology, and the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Professor Fisher has served as an assessor of grant applications for the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Commonwealth Aids Research Grants Scheme, the USA National Science Foundation and the Wellcome Trust in the UK.

He was an invited speaker and member of the scientific advisory group for the 'Genetic Olympics', the major International Genetics Congress held in Melbourne last year, and organised the international Dictyostelium conference, a satellite meeting of the Congress. With major articles on microbial phototaxis and microbial development, he is an invited contributor to the Nature Publishing Group's on line Encyclopedia of Life Sciences and to Wiley-VCH's prestigious Encyclopedia of Molecular Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine.

Professor Peta Tait is an academic and creative artist with an extensive background in the practice and theory of theatre, drama and contemporary performance. She is a pioneer of the study of Australian 'physical theatre' and gender identity in Australian theatre.

Her research in performance studies deals with the study of social languages of emotions and theatrical emotions, and the analysis of bodies and identity in physical theatre and circus performance, a project which is supported by the Australian Research Council.

She is also working with South Korean colleagues on the intercultural transaction of emotions in theatre and in 2000 was a visiting scholar at New York University's TISCH School of Arts.

Author of the first books on gender identity and Australian theatre - Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994) - Professor Tait has also co-edited an anthology of women's plays, Australian Women's Drama: Texts and Feminisms (1997/2000) and the first anthology on body-based performance in Australia, Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance (2002).

Her most recent book is Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces in Chekhov's Drama and Stanislavski's Theatre (2002), and she is completing Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (Routledge forthcoming).

Professor Tait has written for major international publications including Theatre Journal, is a contributing editor to TheatreForum, and Australasian Advisory Editor for a soon to be published Encyclopedia of Modern Drama.

Five plays that she has written have been produced, and she worked for more than a decade with the Sydney-based professional group, The Party Line, whose award-winning work was supported by funding from the Australia Council. Her most recently co-written play, Breath by Breath, won a Green Room Award Nomination for best fringe production and has been listed by the Australian Script Centre.

Dr Tait has a BA from Monash, an MA from UNSW, and PhD from UTS, and was a member of the 1988 NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) Playwright's Studio.

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