About COSMOS

To help ensure COSMOS magazine stays abreast of the latest ideas and thinking, an Editorial Advisory Board has been established, made up of leading figures in the sciences and the arts. Current members are:

	Alan Finkel is a neuroscientist and philanthropist, and one of the founders of COSMOS. The Chancellor of Monash University in Melbourne, he is the winner of the 2005 Clunies Ross Medal and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2006 - in both cases for his contribution to science and education. With a PhD in electrical engineering from Monash, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he invented a new voltage clamp that made it possible to measure the electrical activity of previously inaccessible, individual neurons in mammals. He went on to establish Axon Instruments Inc, a scientific equipment manufacturer with a global reputation, and lead it for 22 years until its acquisition in 2004.
	Buzz Aldrin is the Apollo 11 astronaut who, with Neil Armstrong, became the first men to walk on the Moon in 1969. A winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, he is a former commander of the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California and a former astronaut and U.S. Air Force pilot. Since retiring, he has founded a rocket design company, Starcraft Boosters Inc, and established the ShareSpace Foundation, a non-profit organisation devoted to opening the doors to space for all people.
	Mike Archer is Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he has been a professor since 1989. A palaeontologist from childhood, he graduated in biology and geology from Princeton University, served as Director of the Australian Museum, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and other scientific societies and has published hundreds of scientific papers and books. His expeditions and research on fossils from Australia's Riversleigh site are internationally recognised. He is the winner of many awards, including the Eureka Prize for the Promotion of Science, the Clarke Medal, the Verco Medal, the Queensland Museum Medal, the ANZAAS Von Mueller Medal, the Huxley Award, Skeptic of the Year Award and six Whitley awards for books on palaeontology, mammalogy and conservation.
	Damien Broderick is one of Australia's most renowned science fiction writers. A novelist, futurist, critical theorist and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, he holds a doctorate from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature. Credited with inventing the term 'virtual reality', his SF writing has been recognised with five Ditmar and three Aurealis awards, most recently the 2006 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for K-Machines. He has published more than 30 books, including the award-winning The Dreaming Dragons, listed as one of the top 100 science fiction novels since George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
	Paul Davies, an internationally acclaimed physicist and writer, is the Director of Beyond: the Centre for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in Tempe. He has held previous academic appointments at the universities of Cambridge, London, Adelaide and Macquarie, and is chair of the SETI post-detection taskgroup of the International Academy of Astronautics, the team that will decide what to do if an extraterrestrial signal is detected. The author of over 20 books, including bestsellers The Goldilocks Enigma and The Mind of God, he is the winner 2001 Kelvin Medal by Britain's Institute of Physics, and the 2002 Faraday Prize by the Royal Society. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology.
	Bryan Gaensler is a Federation Fellow and Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney. He was the 1999 Young Australian of the Year, a 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and is the 2006 winner of the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize awarded by the American Astronomical Society for outstanding achievement in observational astronomy. A former Hubble Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Clay Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, he has taught astronomy at Harvard University and authored or co-authored over 120 scientific papers on neutron stars, black holes, supernova explosions or cosmic magnetic fields. He is currently the International Project Scientist for the Square Kilometre Array, a planned next-generation radio telescope which will answer fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the universe.
	Judith Whitworth is the Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research and Howard Florey Professor of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra. She is Chair of the World Health Organisation's Global Advisory Committee on Health Research, a council member of the Global Forum on Health Research, an Ambassador for Canberra and an Ambassador for Women. A graduate of the University of Melbourne, she is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, has chaired the Medical Research Committee of Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council, and is a past-president of the Australian Society for Medical Research. She has served as Australia's Chief Medical Officer and as Professor of Medicine at St George Hospital, University of New South Wales.
	Robyn Williams is an Australian science journalist and broadcaster who has hosted The Science Show on ABC Radio National since its inception in 1975. The author of more than 10 books, he is a former Reuters Fellow at Oxford University, served as president of the Australian Museum Trust and deputy chairman of the Commission for the Future, and is a former president of the ANZAAS Congress. In 1993 he became the first journalist elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He graduated in science from the University of London, and has honorary science doctorates from Deakin, Sydney and Macquarie universities and an honorary doctorate of law from the Australian National University.