Grants & Opportunities

Dandhigu yimbana: Listening on Country for social-emotional wellbeing. Dandhigu yimbana are Gunggari words used to acknowledge the impact and different meanings of listening on Country for First Nations peoples. This project is implemented by community-based and academic Indigenous researchers, engaged in promoting social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) through deep active listening practices. It will contribute to reforms at the cultural interface of Indigenous health and arts-based research and extend international evidence of the strong contribution of the arts in promoting wellbeing and health equity and in enhancing research quality and impact. It uses Arts and Indigenous research methods to understand the relationship between the wellbeing of Country and people mediated through listening practices.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: Dr Vicki Saunders

Advancing Indigenous social marketing process and practices. Youth sexual violence and abuse (YSVA) affects urban, regional and remote communities, with Indigenous youth disproportionately impacted. This project aims to reduce YSVA rates in Indigenous populations, focusing on local needs and promoting shared responsibility and awareness. With a national child sexual abuse rate of 28.5%, the project addresses lifelong impacts. Anticipated outcomes involve three pilot studies, implementing bystander programs, fostering safe relationships and social connections, and developing an Indigenous theory. Aligned with Queensland's YSVA Steering Committee report, benefits will include creating positive change within communities like Jagera, Giabal, and Jarowair, contributing to a reduction in YSVA.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 3506 - Marketing. Lead: Dr Jessica Harris

Community-Led Approaches to Teaching Australian South Sea Islander History. This project argues that a new approach to teaching Australian South Sea Islander history in primary and secondary school education is urgently needed to address conditions by which Australian South Sea Islander students are made disadvantaged at school. Through a Tok Stori methodological approach that draws on community knowledges, this project will develop new ways of teaching Australian South Sea Islander history. It will work towards implementing the kind of meaningful progress that failed to follow the 1993 Recognition, build transnational research links, and increase and strengthen the capacity of Australian South Sea Islander educators and researchers. . Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4513 - Pacific Peoples Culture, Language and History. Lead: Dr Francis Bobongie-Harris

Advanced Heart Simulator: Unveiling the Fluid Dynamics of Heart Valves. This project aims to develop an experimental and computational platform to simulate the dynamic interaction between blood flow and heart valves. This project will significantly improve our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms governing heart valve function. Therefore, the outcome of this project is an state-of-the-art heart simulator, a critical tool for assessing and refining innovative heart valve designs, characterising how they perform under realistic physiological conditions. The deep understanding and robust experimental capability delivered by this platform are essential to the future development of safer, more effective prosthetic heart valves in Australia, thus improving the lives of patients with heart valve disease.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4012 - Fluid Mechanics and Thermal Engineering. Lead: Prof Zhi-Yong Li

Enhancing Antimicrobial Activity Using Synergistic Resistance Mitigation. This project aims to combat antibiotic resistance by developing synergistic compounds targeting the extracellular polymeric substance in biofilms. Utilizing Neolixir's NeoX-101 platform, compounds will be screened to identify combinations disrupting the extracellular polymeric matrix. New insights into nanoscale extracellular polymeric matrix interactions will be generated using metabolomics and high-resolution imaging. Outcomes include an extracellular polymeric matrix-targeting toolbox for potentiating antibiotics and a robust screening pipeline. Benefits include accelerating novel antibiotic resistance strategies and fostering polymer and nanoscale imaging innovation against biofilm infections. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 3403 - Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry. Lead: Prof Killugudi Swaminatha-Iyer

Radiatively cooled high-performance solar cell. This project aims to develop a novel type of flexible solar cell (FSC), which integrates microstructures for radiative cooling and nanostructures for light trapping. The project expects to develop the first self-cooling FSC and generate new knowledge in renewable energy and advanced manufacturing. The expected outcome is increased conversion efficiency through enhanced absorption of solar energy and lower energy consumption through more efficient cooling during operation. Self-cooling of the FSC can minimise heat-introduced degradation and extend its lifetime. This project should provide a revolutionary solution to the bottleneck of the thermal instability of FSCs and increase their cost effectiveness, promoting commercialisation.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Han Lin

Community completeness in monitoring of post-mining restoration success. This project will investigate why particular plant species and plant functions are absent from post-mining vegetation using the ecological concepts of species pools, dark diversity, and community completeness. This collaborative research between ecologists, statisticians and the mining industry will develop AI-driven tools to more effectively monitor the vegetation against restoration targets and deepen our understanding of how a community reassembles after disturbance by mining. Such tools will benefit both industry and regulators by enhancing the on-ground decisions and practices applied in ecosystem rehabilitation.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 3103 - Ecology. Lead: Prof Ladislav Mucina

Mass Spectrometer for Label-Free Molecular Imaging at Ultra-High Resolution. This project will establish next-generation mass spectrometry capabilities for imaging and identification of molecules in complex systems such as tissue, cells, plants and marine organisms. The project expects to generate new knowledge in the biological, chemical and environmental sciences and realise high spatial resolution (1 µm) capabilities 5-fold higher than currently available in Australia. Expected outcomes include new technologies for multidisciplinary research and a critical mass of expertise to position Australia at the forefront of spatial-omics. This should provide significant benefits, such as new capabilities for studying spatially-defined systems that benefits areas such as biotechnology, pharmaceutical and materials science.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3401 - Analytical Chemistry. Lead: A/Prof Shane Ellis

Low-Cost Carbon Materials from Agricultural Biomass for Battery Anodes. Agricultural biomass is an abundant, renewable, low-cost carbon source for producing sustainable products. This project aims to convert renewable agricultural biomass into sustainable low-cost carbon materials for high performance sodium ion battery applications. It will generate new knowledge and low-cost innovative approaches for large-scale synthesis of carbon materials from agricultural biomass. Expected outcomes include advanced multi-product biorefinery and manufacturing technologies and enhanced capacity for research collaborations. These outcomes will accelerate the development of a new, low-carbon manufacturing industry for producing sustainable chemicals and carbon materials from agricultural biomass in regional Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4004 - Chemical Engineering. Lead: Prof Zhanying Zhang

Mitigating disinfection by-products - are we creating more toxic chemicals? Disinfection is an essential barrier to pathogenic microorganisms in drinking water. However, disinfectants such as chlorine can react with natural precursors in water to produce toxic disinfection by-products (DBPs). This presents a complex challenge for water utilities as some mitigation strategies can unintentionally produce more toxic DBPs. This project aims to refine water treatment strategies to minimise formation of toxic DBPs in drinking water. The project will combine advanced chemical and bioassay methods to evaluate DBP formation and toxicity. The outcomes will enable water utilities to identify treatment processes to reduce DBP formation and toxicity, thus ensuring ongoing provision of safe drinking water for all Australians.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4004 - Chemical Engineering. Lead: Prof Frederic Leusch

The Australian Emulation Network Phase 2 - Extending the Reach. This project aims to extend the reach of the Australian Emulation Network, conserving born digital artefacts and making them accessible for research purposes. High value collections from university archives and the GLAM sector requiring legacy computer environments will be targeted. The project expects to generate new knowledge across media arts, design, and architecture. Expected outcomes include stabilising and providing researchers with emulated access to born digital cultural artefacts, sharing legacy computer environments across the network, and expanding the Australian software preservation Community of Practice, building skills in preserving and emulating digital cultural artefacts across an expanded set of domains and institutions.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3605 - Screen and Digital Media. Lead: Prof Melanie Swalwell

Regional and Urban Greenhouse Gas Emission Detection (RUGGED) . The facility proposed here will establish a network of sun-sensing spectrometers for detection of changes in atmospheric composition. The instruments can be deployed to regions or facilities of interest to capture the total change of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to these regions or facilities, for example at urban scales, or areas of intense natural or anthropogenic emissions or uptake. The greenhouse gas quantification system will provide valuable independent estimates of emissions, to enable verification of bottom-up greenhouse gas inventories and satellite-based estimates of emissions... Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3702 - Climate Change Science. Lead: A/Prof Nicholas Deutscher

A platform for in situ structural biology. This project aims to establish an Australian facility for in situ structural biology. The Arctis cryo-plasma focused ion beam will enable cryo-electron microscopy on a large range of samples from bacteria, plants, animal cells, tissues and organs to soft materials. This project expects to reveal new structural information in situ generating knowledge in the fields of microbiology, cell and developmental biology and in bioengineering and materials science. Expected outcomes are fundamental discoveries, training opportunities, international collaborations, and high impact publications. This project should provide significant benefits through underpinning innovation in renewal energy generation and storage, drug delivery, and nanotechnology.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Lead: Prof Georg Ramm

Addressing reproductive violence in migrant and refugee communities. This project aims to address a critical gap in knowledge about migrant women’s experience of a serious form of family violence: reproductive coercion and abuse. Through a mixed methods design this project expects to advance understanding and identify opportunities to increase the safety of survivors. Expected outcomes include a new conceptual model, co-designed, culturally responsive resources for communities and health professionals, and recommendations for legislative and policy change. The results should benefit migrant communities, legal and health professionals working with migrant communities, and policy makers through improved conceptual knowledge, suggestions for legal reform, and evidence-based resources for workforce training.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4203 - Health Services and Systems. Lead: Dr Nicola Sheeran

Building integrity into the Nature Positive promise. Rampant deforestation, spreading invasive species, and climate change is causing mass biodiversity loss. This natural crisis poses a threat to human and planetary health. Many nations, including Australia, committed to the Global Goal for Nature, aiming for nature positive status by 2030. However, stakeholders including government and businesses lack clarity on how to achieve this goal. This project, a world-first in its comprehensive approach, aims to understand the state in which nature was in, as well as the trend of nature’s health over time. The outcomes include a framework for how nature can be measured and a decision-making tool to identify actions, as well as demonstrate progress towards nature positive success.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4102 - Ecological Applications. Lead: Dr Michelle Ward

Green fabrication of robust micro/nano hierarchical surface morphology. This project aims to fabricate coating material with robust micro/nano hierarchical structured surface in ambient conditions through mimicking natural biological processes. This study expects to generate knowledge for translating natural biological processes into cutting-edge sustainable and scalable low-cost manufacturing technique using biowaste, minerals and waste plastic through interdisciplinary approaches. Expected outcomes include potential next-generation environmentally friendly marine coating exhibiting self-cleaning and drag reduction. This should deliver significant economic and environmental benefits for maritime industry and contribute to further Australian standing in the field of circular economy.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4005 - Civil Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Lily (Yali) Li

Unravelling the molecular basis of CD8+ T cell development and behaviour . The immune system is essential in disease resistance and resilience across diverse species and ecosystems. CD8+ T cells are a critical component of effective immunity. However, the molecular mechanisms governing their development and behaviour are poorly understood. This project aims to explore these mechanisms in unprecedented depth using an innovative in vivo CRISPR/Cas gene editing platform. Expected outcomes from this project include transformative insights into the genetic networks regulating CD8+ T cell immunity, and the establishment of an advanced novel platform for studying immune cell biology. This research promises significant benefits in advancing fundamental immunology and facilitating future studies in this field.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3204 - Immunology. Lead: Prof Marco Herold

The stone toolkit of the first Homo sapiens from Africa to Australia. This project aims to explore the technological variability of Homo sapiens in their expansion out of Africa to Australia over the last 200,000 years. The project expects to generate new knowledge in the areas of archaeology and human origins by employing groundbreaking 3D computational analysis of stone tools found in sites spanning the period of Homo sapiens expansion. Expected outcomes of this project are to understand the technological underpinning of our forebears' successful expansion out of Africa, their replacement of other hominin species, and the pace and routes of expansion. This should provide significant benefits in understanding human evolution and the resilience of our species in the face of major climate change.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4301 - Archaeology. Lead: Prof Christopher Clarkson

Teen-informed strategies to counter sexual image abuse and sextortion. Coming of age has never been so fraught. Many teens use sexts to consensually explore emerging sexual citizenship. Yet this is prohibited, and teens-who-sext may experience gender-linked sexual shaming and victimisation, including by adults. This cultural studies project gathers teens' perspectives upon and remedies for peer-perpetrated and peer-magnified image-based sexual harassment and abuse. Reports of sextortion, sexualised deepfakes and blackmail of teens by adult predators are rising, even as teens worry that reporting such abuse might see them, as victim, accused of creating child exploitation material. Project outcomes align with a Rights of the Child approach and will mitigate risk, reducing harm while supporting vulnerable peers.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4702 - Cultural Studies. Lead: Prof Lelia Green

Human-Machine Teaming in a Communications-denied Environment. This project will develop new learning and long-term memory capabilities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance human-machine teaming in challenging and communications-denied environments. It will develop new approaches for AI systems to predict future human behaviour, to improve abilities to rapidly respond to changes in the environment, and to enable stronger decision-making with incomplete and uncertain data. New methods will be developed for complex and adversarial environments to support a range of industry sectors including collaborative and service robotics, manufacturing, and transport. Outcomes will increase Australia’s competitive advantage in AI, augmenting human abilities, and will support sovereign defence capabilities.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4603 - Computer Vision and Multimedia Computation. Lead: Prof Clinton Fookes

Understanding social-ecological feedbacks in protected area resilience. The project aims to describe, quantify and understand feedbacks between societies and ecosystems, both in and adjacent to protected areas. Using the Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework to describe and quantify system structure, it will collect empirical data from 40 protected areas and progress from statistical analysis to empirical simulation models of feedbacks. Models of feedbacks will be used to clarify influences on protected area resilience. The project will improve understanding of how to efficiently monitor social-ecological dynamics and enhance protected area resilience to climate change and other shocks. Insights resulting from the analysis will support protected area governance and management in Australia and South Africa.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4104 - Environmental Management. Lead: Prof Graeme Cumming

Evolutionary Framework for Electric Vehicles and Drones Logistics Systems. This project aims to develop an adaptive evolutionary approach for solving electric vehicle and drone-supported, last-mile logistics and distribution planning problems. The project addresses the escalating challenges in current logistics systems by focusing on enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and minimizing the environmental impact of logistics systems. This novel approach will challenge existing methodologies, offering enhanced decision-making approaches, significant economic and environmental benefits, a robust decision-making tool and strong research training, with a vision for long-term impact on logistics efficiency. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4602 - Artificial Intelligence. Lead: Prof Ruhul Sarker

Transformed landscapes: 3000 years of adaptation and resilience in Vanuatu. This project aims to explore the history of dramatic human modification of a Pacific Island landscape over the past 3000 years and draws out the implications of these transformations for future generations in a changing global climate. Since initial settlement, the island of Efate in Vanuatu has been spectacularly altered by a series of socio-agrosystems, recently revealed by LiDAR aerial imagery. This transdisciplinary project will combine field and archival research by archaeologists, historians and linguists to map social and agricultural development across Efate, generating a deep-time perspective that will inform responses to contemporary challenges around population growth and food security in the Pacific.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4513 - Pacific Peoples Culture, Language and History. Lead: A/Prof Stuart Bedford

An integrated framework to understand emotional learning. Positive and negative emotional responses enrich or harm the quality of our everyday lives. Although the acquisition of emotional responses is well understood, less is known about how they can be modified – amplified or reduced. The proposed research will address this gap, building on our team’s research on both human fear and evaluative conditioning and cutting-edge findings in these areas. The project is innovative in its focus on (a) positive and negative emotional learning; and (b) the processes underlying this learning. The project will provide the foundational knowledge required for the development of an integrated framework of emotional learning and the design of psychological interventions to reduce fear and interpersonal biases.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 5202 - Biological Psychology. Lead: Prof Ottmar Lipp

Using a Light-induced Field-Gradient to Promote Homogeneous Catalysis. Synthesizing fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals often relies on homogeneous transition metal-complex catalysts for their selectivity and efficiency. However, they are difficult to separate and reuse. This project offers a solution to not only overcome limitations of traditional catalysts but that can enhance metal-complex catalyst performance by leveraging the optical properties of plasmonic metal nanoparticles. Our approach will advance understanding of light-matter interactions and explore parameters of a versatile photocatalyst design to achieve high-turnover chemical synthesis with minimal catalyst waste. It will provide invaluable training opportunities for graduate students, contributing significantly to our knowledge-based economy.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3406 - Physical Chemistry. Lead: Prof Dr Huai-Yong Zhu