Charles Sturt, after whom the university is named, his mantra was in the public good, and that's one of the reasons why he was chosen as the person after whom the university would be named because of his commitment to the public good. And that is very much what the Charles Sturt mission is. Which the ethos of the university is a Wiradjuri phrase gifted to us by Wiradjuri Nation called Ana, which is the wisdom of respectfully knowing how to live well in a world worth living in.

That's the philosophy of which we apply our research. So it's about us understanding country, and it's not just understanding country in a physical sense. It's a spiritual sense. It's about having connections with country. It's about understanding what country can provide, and it's about understanding how we interact with country.

I've been very fortunate in that CSU supports this multidisciplinary work and has also encouraged it. And so together we've built a team of experts that hopefully is having a strong impact on regional and also national economy. But while we're doing that, we're attracting international recognition for the work that we also do.

Well, I think right now we're in an era of information transfer that's just astounding. We're bombarded with new findings and new discoveries and use of technology that we never had before, and so it's very exciting because we're no longer working in a box. We're working with many people from different fields and different practices.

The work that that I do and the work of my team is really about coming up with solutions. The last 25 years has been a journey of coming up with technical solutions to try and make sure that fish can thrive at the same time that we still extract the water for towns and for farming and for all the other things that we need.

And so we do a lot of work on technical solutions. It's when the limit of the field is somewhere, ask why. What's holding us back at that point, everyone else has moved on because that's the limit. And my thing is always to look at what's holding us back and try and think of innovative ways to get around it.

Because the big discoveries are when no one else is looking. There are people doing incredible work who are using our template and our way that we have set up to do research and replicating that across the world to really understand how children learn to speak and how to support them if they have speech and language difficulties.

And just last year, we had 82,000 visitors to the website accessing our resources. 

I grew up in a small city in Iran, and I always wanted to be a scientist, since I was very small but in my wildest dreams, I never thought I'm going to become a parasitologist. 

Obviously, I don't think many people do, but then I was really, really lucky because CSU is, in my opinion, the best place in Australia to study our ecosystem, to study our environment, and especially studying parasites. 

Part of the CSU campuses are located across Murray Darling Basin, which is known as the nation's food bowl. And parasites, as we know, just go between plants, animals, and humans. So there is no better place in the country than CSU to work on that.

I think if we are going to provide the politicians with the information they need to make correct decisions, we've got to come up with new ways of presenting, measuring environmental situations, and presenting that information to them and to the public. 

So my big plan is to develop rapid economic verifiable systems for measuring biodiversity in any environment and providing the platform so that decision makers can make big, bold moves.

They're going to need that information and very shortly at the moment, we don't have the systems to do that. 

I think CSU is in a really enviable position. It has a wonderful presence in its communities. 

It has a large geographic footprint. We are certainly very attuned to what the needs of our regions are and willing to have a go at looking at what could solve those, as well as to think differently about what the opportunities might be.

We teach what we do, and it's that authenticity in our education programs feeding through into that future workforce where they're not just learning about agriculture or veterinary science, or novel technologies in an abstract concept as part of a degree course where they're never confronted with that day to day.

We have our farms on site. We have our processes next door. We have industry placements for students and our industry partners coming into teach in our courses. 

And so we are constantly exposing them to the world that they're going to go out and work in. So everything we do on the teaching front helps to create a world worth living in. 

And of course, on the research front, people are driven all the time by the excitement that their discoveries can make a difference in our regions and in the world. 

I'd like to see Charles Sturt recognised as the truly innovative and forward thinking research university that it is.