As the science advances, Rotary members join the quest to find malaria vaccines

By Ruby Prosser Scully Photography by Rhys Martin

At first it just seemed like a bad flu.

The illness struck Danielle Stanisic while she was in New York for a research gig, her first time living away from home in Australia. It was her lab mates, though, who grew alarmed and insisted she get tested. It turned out Stanisic, who had traveled to Papua New Guinea six months earlier, had malaria.

A week-long RYLA retreat in Sydney was the catalyst that sparked Jordan O’Reilly’s resolve to transform disability support across Australia.

Early in 2012, Jordan O’Reilly arrived at Narrabeen on Sydney’s Northern Beaches for the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA), an intensive week-long program.

At the time, he was working on an idea for a new charity to support young Australians with a disability. His inspiration was his brother, Shane, who is 18 months younger and has cerebral palsy.

Jayathi and Jayath Jaiganesh’s journey into storytelling and STEM did not begin with a grand plan or a push toward achievement. Instead, it grew quietly from curiosity – about nature, technology and how the world works.

Words: Sarah Atkins. President, No Borders Rotaract.

Jayathi and Jayath are two teenagers who seem endlessly absorbed in learning more about the world. Based in Pōneke Wellington, NZ, they have a growing list of accomplishments between them: tennis championships, writing competition wins, football and cricket victories.

During her Rotary Peace Fellowship, Branka Panic worked as a short-term consultant at the World Bank, joining a team that was building a model to predict the probability of famine.

The benefits of such a tool were obvious: “If a certain area will be in need of food in six months, in 12 months, we can prepare humanitarian aid more efficiently,” Panic says.

But unintended consequences of making that information available also became clear. “Our intention was to make humanitarian agencies ready,” Panic says. “But what if, by providing this signal as an open source, we were actually informing the government or any warring party out there to intentionally attack this population because they see there is a vulnerability?”

The exercise illustrated both the power and the danger of using such technologies. It surfaced ethical questions to be mindful of and the sensitivities of parsing data and sharing it widely.