Gavin Brown to Become Inaugural Director of the Royal Institution of Australia. (May 30, 2008)

Gavin Brown will retire from the vice-chancellorship of The University of Sydney on July 10th 2008, having served as V-C for 12 years.

At the opening of the newly renovated Royal Institution of of Great Britain by Queen Elizabeth II on May 28 the Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann announced the formation of the Royal Institution of Australia, which is to be patterned on the RiGB, and that its inaugural director will be Professor Brown.

The RiAus will be based in Adelaide and its chairman, Mr Peter Yates, said that Professor Brown's appointment and the significant financial donations from the South Australian Government and Santos would help RiAus's in its role to engender an active interest in science by Australians.

Mr Yates  said: "It is our hope that under the guidance of Professor Brown, the RiAus will stimulate a wide interest in science, bring it into people's homes and inspire discussions around dinner tables across Australia. Issues like climate change and stem cell research that affect us all should not be confined to the laboratory; we need to democratise science so that it is accessible to everyone."

According to Professor Brown: "It is exciting and important to deepen community understanding of the big issues of Science and Innovation as Australia moves to a creative economy."

The RiAus is scheduled to open early next year and will also be home to the Australian Science Media Centre that Mr Yates also chairs and which promotes science stories to the media.

The Stock Exchange building in the centre of Adelaide will house the RiAus.

Dr Michael Spence of the University of Oxford, has been appointed as the university's next vice-chancellor. A Fellow of St Catherine's College, Dr Spence has been Head of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Oxford, and in replacing Professor Brown, whose research interests were in pure mathematics, it will be interesting to watch the direction in which the incoming v-c will take the nation's oldest university.