Dr Thomas Barlow
Thomas Barlow runs a consulting business providing expert advice to research organizations and companies about business and innovation strategy.
Highly respected within the Australian scientific community for his enthusiasm, independent thinking and imagination, he has held research fellowships in chemistry and biomedical science at Oxford University in the UK, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. In both these institutions his research on protein structure prediction and drug design was at the boundary of computing, biology and chemistry.
For three years from 2002 to 2004, Dr Barlow was the Science Adviser to Dr Brendan Nelson, then the Minister for Education, Science and Training in the Australian Government. In this role, he was instrumental in developing research priorities for the government's $5.4 billion annual expenditure on science and innovation. He was closely involved with a comprehensive study to "map" science and innovation capabilities across the nation. And he played a key role in the development of Backing Australia's Ability 2, a package outlining Australian Government science policy to 2011.
As a weekly columnist for the Financial Times newspaper in London, his columns "Appliance of Science", "Top to Toe", and "On the Breadline" were frequently republished and translated into other languages. In this capacity, Dr Barlow became particularly well known as the author of "Tribal Workers", an extended feature written for the Financial Times about work/life trends among modern professionals.
In the late 1990s, Thomas Barlow was the screenwriter of the British comedy feature film, "Married 2 Malcolm", which gained international release in a variety of formats and miraculously recouped its production costs of £3 million.
He holds a DPhil in Theoretical Chemistry from Oxford University and a BSc (Hons I) from Sydney University, where he was awarded the University Medal in Chemistry.
The Australian Miracle, published in April 2006 by Picador, is his first book.