The ties that bind

Dr Lijing Wang

Suburban Melbourne is a long way from the rural town in the north-east Chinese province of Heilongjiang where Lijing Wang was born.

Covered in snow for months at a time, the town was home to families who had to be self-sufficient, making almost all they owned and eating only what their small farms could produce.

"My home town was quite similar to regional cities here but the way of life in the 1960s when I was growing up was more like the experience of Australia’s early settlers," Wang says.

"With the booming Chinese economy, the place has been transformed and the people there are working hard to catch up with the West."

Wang studied in Tianjin for 13 years before coming to Australia in 1993 to reunite with his wife, who was studying in Sydney. He completed a doctorate in textile technology and joined what became RMIT’s School of Fashion and Textiles.

After leaving for a decade-long stint as a textile research academic in Geelong, Wang returned to RMIT’s Brunswick campus last year.

His research focus is fibre processing and smart textiles, working on projects such as advanced sportswear, compression garments, intelligent electronic textiles and stab and bullet-proof fabrics.

Wang’s strong ties to China’s textile manufacturing industry have, unsurprisingly, been helpful to his work.

"Maintaining my connections with the industry and research institutions in China has opened up many opportunities," he says.

"Through my network in Tianjin, we recently signed off on an agreement between RMIT and Tianjin Polytechnic University, enabling their students to do the last years of their degrees here. I also work on research projects with various overseas institutions, including the Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

"As markets and production processes become increasingly global, these relationships will become even more vital in future.

"Textile technology is an area with immense growth potential. If we can bring together Australia’s strengths in research and technology with China’s manufacturing capabilities, who knows what we might achieve."

Professor Irena Cosic

Even as a little girl, playing ball games on the street outside her family’s apartment in the centre of Belgrade, Irena Cosic always knew what her future would hold.

"My whole family - my mother, my father, my grandfather, my great aunt - they’re all engineers," she says. "All my parents’ friends, nearly everyone I knew was an engineer. So I had no choice. There was just no other profession that was considered important."

In the post-war years in Central Europe, engineers were more highly regarded than any other profession, playing a critical role in reconstruction efforts.

Cosic focused at first on electronics then specialised in biomedical engineering, working to understand electro-magnetic waves and their effect on the brain, cells and proteins.

After working for 12 years in the Vinca Institute, the Serbian equivalent of the CSIRO, Cosic came to Australia with her family, "for the adventure".

At RMIT since 2002, Cosic is now the Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, and leads the University’s Biomedical Electronic Group. The group’s many projects focus on developing the major breakthrough Cosic uncovered while still in Serbia - that the electro-magnetic properties of proteins in human cells define their biological function.

"I found out how to read information in the protein that tells us what it will do," she says.

"Before, it was like we could see individual letters but didn’t know which language the proteins were speaking. What I discovered was the language, which is electro-magnetic, but we’ve only just begun understanding how that language works."

Though in Australia for more than two decades, Cosic has retained close ties to her homeland. She has long-standing collaborations with Vinca and the University of Belgrade, with academics swapping between RMIT and the Serbian institutes to further research projects.

"Our early career researchers are also working together, taking the initiative and setting up their own partnerships with academics over there. That kind of cross-fertilisation of ideas, across such vast distances, it’s fantastic to see."

Professor Supriya Singh

Growing up in Delhi after the 1947 Indian partition, Supriya Singh saw in her own family a reflection of the social changes that transformed her country when 12 million people swept across the newly-created borders.

"Education became very important, particularly for women," she says. "I grew up always seeing my mother studying.

"Families like ours, who were dislocated from their homes at partition, didn’t have the security of men’s incomes or their kinship groups. Gender norms changed.

"Women’s place in the market, their search for financial independence - that was all my mother’s struggle."

Informed by her experience, Singh brings great empathy to her work on the nature of globalisation and its relationship to money and technology, at the RMIT Global Cities Research Institute.

Her research covers one of the largest foreign money flows in the world - remittances sent home by migrant workers.

Remittances dwarf foreign aid and are worth more than direct foreign investment in developing countries but their economic importance has only recently been recognised. India is the largest recipient of remittances, receiving about $US52 billion in 2008.

"Like much of my work, this issue touches a personal chord," says Singh, who is also Professor, Sociology of Communications in RMIT’s College of Business.

"My older sisters sent money home to Delhi from Mumbai and New York, and our survival depended on that 200 rupees each month.

"But in Asian cultures, sharing money within the family is simply the done thing. Money in Anglo-Australian families tends to flow one way - from parent or grandparent to child.

"It’s only when I came here in 1986 and started researching money that I realised the differences in cultural attitudes."

Singh spent 19 years in Malaysia before coming to Melbourne. Australia, where she has lived longer than anywhere else, is now home.

"Having lived in a range of different cultures, with a habit of reflecting on my experiences, I bring those observations to my work, where it all comes together."

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