Professor Mark Hutchinson, President at Science & Technology Australia and Director of CNBP Science addresses the National Press Club on why Australia needs to ‘level up’ on research commercialisation – and how to do it.

As President of the not-for-profit peak body for the science and technology sectors, Mark represents 90,000 scientists and technologists nationwide. One of the key themes of his leadership has been to drive the case for deeper investment in research commercialisation.

This would take more great Australian science and technology, and turn it into new Australian jobs and companies. In this speech, he champions training a new generation of “bench to boardroom scientists” – brilliant science, technology, and engineering talent who can take their complex research breakthroughs from the lab bench into the boardrooms of the nation to secure the nation’s economic future. The Prime Minister’s recent announcement at the National Press Club of a $2.2 billion package for research commercialisation is a powerful investment in that future.

In his speech, Professor Hutchinson will also reflect on the crucial role of science throughout the pandemic. He will also cast forward to the science infrastructure and capabilities we will need to build to face the next sets of complex challenges on the horizon.

Mark exemplifies a new breed of Australian entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators. A world leader in research commercialisation, his centre of excellence has created 15 startup and spinoff companies in seven years under his high-energy leadership.

Dismantling the traditional silos between the study of immunology and pharmacology, Professor Hutchinson’s research brings together engineers, physicists, chemists, and biologists who use light to understand what is happening at a cellular level in the brain and spinal cord. His ground-breaking approach has identified how human brains respond to drugs of dependence and holds out the prospect of better treatments for chronic pain. As Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP), Professor Hutchinson passionately supports bench-to-boardroom scientists.

He is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a Professor of the Adelaide Medical School at the University of Adelaide.