Dr Robert Pfeifer from the Department of Physics and Astronomy has taken out the Sydney Fresh Science competition held on Monday last week for his research, ‘Sydney scientist discovers secrets of nature’s strangest materials’.

“Anyons are the weirdest particles known to man, appearing distinguishable at first but passing their identities like a masquerade when you shuffle them around,” says Dr Pfeifer. “They have only recently been discovered in the laboratory, and we have been using cutting edge computer simulations to predict their behaviour — and we’ve found some real surprises!”

Trevor Chong from then Department of Cognitive Sciences also competed and received an honourable mention for his presentation of ‘Unconscious recognition memory: ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.

Fresh Science is a national program training early-career researchers how to tell the story of their scientific discoveries and has been running for 18 years. Other Fresh Science events were held in Melbourne, Townsville, Adelaide and Brisbane.

The eleven Fresh Scientists spent the Monday before the event talking to local TV, radio and print journalists at the Australian Museum, fine-tuning their science-communication and media skills.

“The conversations and the practice interviews with professional journalists were fantastic development experiences, and we all came away with a much stronger understanding of what the different forms of media look for in a story. We could all see the way we presented ourselves changing over the course of the day,” says Dr Pfeifer.

The scientists then each presented their scientific discoveries at an event at the 3 Wise Monkeys pub on Monday 31 August.

“It was great fun presenting my research to an enthusiastic and friendly audience. With only as long to speak as it took for a firework sparkler to burn down, we were definitely under some pressure to get our points across! Trevor also gave an excellent talk, and I definitely felt that he was the strongest competition for first place,” says Dr Pfeifer.