The Laborastory

Jess Moir is a Melbourne comedian who regularly performs at the Brunswick Green. She has two kids and lets them mix bi-carb soda with vinegar whenever they want. Jess has lived overseas, including in Nigeria, where she learned more than she wanted to about Ebola.

Jacquie Milner has spent a lot of time looking up at the sky. She has been an amateur astronomer for the past 30 years, and has been doing outreach for various organisations, including Perth Observatory and, more locally, Mount Burnett Observatory, for 22 years. She even did a short stint under the dome in the Scitech Planetarium in Perth. For Laborastory she went back to her environmental science roots to talk about the atmosphere, and two men who saved an important part of it: Frank Rowland and Mario Molina.

Mitch Alexander is a socialist, atheist, utilitarian, unionist, reductionist metalhead, stand up comedian and philosopher who hates labels.

Ben accepted and completed a PhD quest to vaccinate chickens against pathogens. His class is dual molecular and microbiology, and weapon specialisation is PCR. He is currently searching for NPCs to find and accept a Post-doctoral quest, so he can continue to take the long road to the hard life in biological research, in a climate that's underfunded and oversaturated.

Arjun Chahal is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. His research utilizes fruit flys to understand the fundamentals of tissue growth and how disruptions to these processes can lead to diseases like cancer. When he isn’t looking for a lucrative modeling contract as the face of Vetolin, he enjoys coming up with creative answers to how his thesis is going that won’t trigger calls to Life-line. He currently has an Impact Factor of - 1.

James is a visual science communicator using words, pictures & moving pictures to make complex information easier to understand. He's been making science and technology more engaging for 20 years, having started as a researcher with Beyond 2000 in 1996

Alanta has a Masters in International Public Health and has worked on health programs in Uganda, Kenya, Cambodia and East Timor, around HIV, Malaria, and nutrition.

She now works for Engineers Without Borders, taking engineering students to India, Samoa and Cambodia to learn in partnership with rural communities about Human Centred Design.

She is also a comedian, delivering her sell out show ‘Parasites Lost’ and 'Days of our Hives' at Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She hates puns and the entire thing was excruciating.

She’s a mediocre urban farmer, growing mainly organic kale-fed caterpillars. She keeps bees, though admittedly they mainly keep themselves.

Eddie is an engineer / teacher / mathematician who has a love for sci-fi, musicals, stargazing, na-val-gazing, and the human condition. He has worked as an engineer and a teacher, and he apolo-gises on behalf of his fiancé if he puts on his ‘teacher voice’ tonight. He gets overly excited when people talk about maths in normal conversations, and is always disappointed by the representation of scientists in popular culture. He is worried that he isn’t very good at planning for the long-term future, and that he is too easily distracted by shiny things.

Dr Aaron Wagen is a trainee in Neurology, and loves all things brains, arts, and sciences, but is particularly thrilled when those things combine in narrative form. Outside of working as a doctor, he has written and performed in comedic plays and live art pieces in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, burnt his eyeballs while blending human brain in the lab, and is an expert at spontaneous meal creation, always named by the dominant ingredient and the word “surprise”. You will probably know him best as one of the founders of a little known, but entirely excellent, science storytelling night called The Laborastory.

Elizabeth Flux if a freelance writer and editor who has a health science degree despite not studying health science, and a strangely American accent despite having never been to America.