Dr Anthony O'Mullane Senior Research Fellow

TEXT ON SCREEN:  Dr Anthony O'Mullane. Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, School of Applied Sciences. RMIT University.

AUDIO: Ambient music

VISUAL:  Dr Anthony O'Mullane is being interviewed in a laboratory. He sits looking toward the camera.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: So coming to Melbourne, it's obviously a much bigger city compared to Cork. What is it, 4 million versus 300,000 so it's certainly, in terms of scale, it was a lot different.

VISUAL:  Dr O’Mullane in the lab, speaking to camera, intercut with shots looking up Melbourne’s Swanston street with trams and vehicles; pedestrians walking in Melbourne city, then a shot looking down a Melbourne alleyway with pedestrians and people sitting at outdoor café tables.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: I like the way Melbourne is set up with the individual suburbs and kinda collectively around the big city so each of the individual suburbs do have a nice feel to them.

VISUAL:  Melbourne street art on a wall featuring Einstein riding a bicycle, then a looking out towards Port Phillip bay with the ferry terminal in the background, and then a St Kilda street at night.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: At the moment I'm living in St Kilda / Elwood so as you go into Coles, you go, 'Oh man, I'm back in Cork.' Yeah, there's a lot of Irish people definitely in St Kilda at the moment, which is good.

VISUAL: Dr Anthony O'Mullane in the lab, laughing. Cuts to a close-up of hands in a lab working picking up samples with tweezers, and then Dr O'Mullane holds up and inspects a sample of material in the lab.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: In terms of research focus areas it definitely falls within advanced materials and devices so generally what we do is develop new materials with more often than not for a specific application in mind.

VISUAL:  A collection of samples in the lab, then a shot of green liquid samples in bottles, several liquid samples in bottles and beakers and then a close-up of a person working with material samples in a lab. Zoom out.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: In terms of that, you can develop water treatment, removal of contaminants from water, and also, probably, the other main area would be lithium metal batteries using particular solvents called ionic liquids to improve safety, durability life time of that particular technology.

VISUAL: Dr Anthony O'Mullane in the lab, speaking to camera, intercut with shots of an RMIT building at the Melbourne city campus, Dr O'Mullane with paperwork at an outdoor table, and Dr Anthony O'Mullane working in a lab with another man, viewing data on a computer screen.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS:  One of the attractions of RMIT is that it's a smaller university compared to some of the bigger ones here in Australia. So the opportunity to setup your own way of doing research, your own research group is definitely attractive. Kinda do it the way you want to do it. You kinda set things up the way you think they should be correctly done in terms of research direction, how the research is carried out, also the types of students you want to get involved in that research  and also who you collaborate with. So that freedom of choice to carry out good research was definitely a big attraction.

VISUAL:  Back to Dr Anthony O'Mullane in the lab.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: One of the biggest things I did notice was the collective use of instrumentation is particularly useful. Everyone in the school has free access to this high end instrumentation and it's not always the case in other places that you do research. There's individual budgets for machines and things like that.

VISUAL:  Dr Anthony O'Mullane working in a lab with equipment, and then back to him in the lab.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS: So all this very good equipment certainly makes research a lot easier. So I have been fortunate to win an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Having the VC Fellowship before that certainly helps in winning those types of fellowships later on.

VISUAL:  The embroidered breast pocket of a lab coat, reading “RMIT University Applied Chemistry”, then a wider shot of Dr O'Mullane smiling and nodding at the camera, wearing a lab coat.

DR ANTHONY O’MULLANE SPEAKS:  And again you're judged on your track record a lot with those externally funded research fellowships. So demonstrating that you've actually won one competitively with a university certainly aids in achieving those outcomes later on.

VISUAL: FADE TO WHITE

TEXT ON SCREEN:  Find out more at www.rmit.edu.au/research/opportunties. RMIT University logo.

AUDIO:  Ambient music fades out

[End of Transcript]

Copyright statement

Copyright © 2014 RMIT University. All rights reserved.

Conditions of use

This item is available to RMIT University staff for official RMIT educational or promotional purposes. All uses outside of official educational or promotional purposes must be used with permission. Please contact copyright@rmit.edu.au for permission.