Anna Barwick is an award-winning pharmacist and entrepreneur. Her innovative new business PharmOnline was brought to life at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns to help people remotely access the advice and services of pharmacists. As well as running the business, she is also conducting research into how telehealth services such as PharmOnline are accessed by communities, which forms part of her PhD research being conducted at the University of New England.

She was just announced as one of this year’s Superstars of STEM; a role in which she will engage with communities and encourage more young people from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in STEM. In this interview we chat about what the role of a pharmacist is, how it fits in to the health care industry, and what the future of pharmacy in Australia looks like. We also talk about the different career paths available to Pharmacy graduates, and how this is changing with advances in technology and the growing demands on the health care industry.

How much children are exposed to technology, and in particular how long they spend looking at screens and devices, is a heated topic. Dr. Jo Bird from the University of New England studies how young children interact with technology and how imaginative play can incorporate technology just as any other object in their environment. By working with early childhood education centres, she works to improve how kids can play with technology constructively and intentionally. She and James also talk about the growing initiatives to introduce computer coding and computational thinking to kids at younger and younger ages. New technologies in the expanding digital age will require new forms of literacy and problem-solving skills. By introducing children to computational thinking skills, we can open opportunities for children who can excel creatively and intellectually using these skills and tools.

Omelia is a new digital story-telling tool being developed by entertainment industry experts that is being developed right here in Armidale. In this interview we chat with Kate Armstrong-Smith, one of the co-founders of Omelia, to hear about how this new story-telling technology works. With a background in science and the entertainment industry, the team behind Omelia found that advances in technology could open up different ways of developing stories for new media such as video games, the meta verse, and cinematic universes. We also chat about the decision to bring this startup to regional Australia, and how a fortuitous pandemic lockdown experience convinced them that a regional town could be the home for a revolutionary tech-startup.