Grants & Opportunities

Forest restoration for equitable carbon and biodiversity markets. Forest restoration projects are a critical strategy in environmental markets to curb climate change and reverse biodiversity loss. This project develops a tool to help decision-makers identify the best land for forest restoration to maximise 1. carbon, 2. biodiversity, and 3. economic benefits while ensuring restoration does not shift agriculture elsewhere negatively impacting other areas. The tool will be used to design the best options for Australia to expand its environmental markets, and then developed to identify options for international market expansion. This project will guide both governments and the many industries who engage with these markets to ensure net environmental and economic outcomes from their restoration projects.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4104 - Environmental Management. Lead: Dr Brooke Williams

Nonlinear topology optimisation for stretchable mechanical structures. This project aims to develop a novel computational framework for design of stretchable mechanical structures with tailored, exceptional performance. It will address a critical methodological gap in “inverse design” of novel stretchable structures by advancing numerical modelling, data-driven, and optimisation approaches in a nonlinear regime. Expected outcomes include innovative design schemes and development of a new class of stretchable structures to meet increasingly complex functional demands. This could provide significant benefits for technical innovations in soft robotics, wearable technologies, biomedical devices, and energy-absorbing systems, enabling new applications across engineering disciplines.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4017 - Mechanical Engineering. Lead: Dr Chi Wu

Enhancing Social Prescribing. The project aims to enable the integration, long-term adoption, and scalability of social prescribing into Australia’s social system. Social prescribing links people to non-medical services and supports to improve their wellbeing and quality of life. The program will co-design evidence-based infrastructure to support long-term adoption and scalability. Expected outcomes include a secure data hub, enhanced evidence-based social prescribing programs to enable optimised resource allocation, and improved consistency of social services. Given the established cost-effectiveness of social prescribing, significant anticipated benefits include reduced welfare and economic burdens, as well as increased social connection and community wellbeing. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4409 - Social Work. Lead: Dr Rosanne Freak-Poli

Writing Therapy: Narrative Writing and the Making of Mental Health. This project provides a new literary history of psychological knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century, examining the decline of psychoanalysis and the rise of the cognitive therapies. It aims to generate novel insights into the enduring success of therapeutic and self-help writing, as well as the historical development of various vocabularies of well-being. Expected outcomes include an interdisciplinary methodology combining literary, psychological, and cultural history, and the curation of new narrative sources documenting the post-1950s history of psychology. This project is crucial for helping Australians understand the history behind the therapeutic literature with which they engage today.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4705 - Literary Studies. Lead: Dr Christian Gelder

Authentic Assessments for the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence. This project aims to collect, analyse, and represent human-artificial intelligence (AI) writing processes to improve assessment practice in higher education. This project expects to generate knowledge in educational psychology and assessment by combining human-centred design, ethnographic observation, and learning analytics. Expected outcomes of this project include a cross-platform tool for assessing collaborative human-AI writing, insights into authentic human-AI collaboration, improved AI literacy for students and educators, and protocols for the ethical assessment of learning processes. This project will benefit students, educators, and employers by creating more feasible and valid assessments of AI-enhanced skills.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3904 - Specialist Studies In Education. Lead: Dr Zachari Swiecki

Understanding the impact of on-call work on sleep, fatigue, and safety. On-call workers respond to emergencies, maintain critical infrastructure, and keep vital operations running in sectors such as utilities, healthcare, and aviation. But on-call work comes at a cost — the annual financial impact of fatigue-related injuries and fatalities in Australian on-call workers is >$2.25 billion. Surprisingly, we have minimal evidence about how the overnight wakings that characterise most on-call schedules impact sleep, fatigue, and safety. This project aims to investigate the acute effects of repeated overnight calls on sleep, fatigue, and safety risk. Findings will advance knowledge on the effects of on-call work, strengthen fatigue management guidance materials, and improve safety for on-call workers and communities.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 5204 - Cognitive and Computational Psychology. Lead: Dr Madeline Sprajcer

Race, Gender, and Violence in Western Militaries in the War on Terror. This project aims to investigate the experiences of women and racial minorities who served in Western militaries in the War on Terror. After 9/11, Western militaries deployed diverse soldier-forces to fight the War on Terror. Yet these militaries waged a deeply racialised and gendered war, while soldiers faced institutional racism and sexual violence. Drawing on oral history methods, intersectional analysis, and an innovative mapping technology, the project will create new knowledge about the interplay of race, gender, and violence in military contexts. This should provide significant benefits, including recommendations for military reform, recognition of marginalised veterans, and new ways of thinking about the anti-terror project.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4303 - Historical Studies. Lead: Dr Mia Martin Hobbs

Nonlinear scheduling optimisation for green hydrogen production. This project aims to develop cutting-edge mathematical algorithms to optimise operation scheduling for green hydrogen plants, to enhance overall productivity and reduce green hydrogen production costs. Optimisation problems in this domain are highly nonlinear and of massive scale. The project will leverage recent breakthroughs in integer programming and nonlinear optimisation to create efficient computational algorithms for overcoming this complexity. These algorithms will provide critical insights into optimal operations strategies for potential Australian hydrogen scenarios. The new theoretical developments will contribute to bridging the gap between discrete and continuous optimisation, two fields that are normally studied disparately.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4903 - Numerical and Computational Mathematics. Lead: Dr Hoa Bui

Secure Deep Learning Inference with Privacy Protection. This project aims to investigate output privacy risks and develop corresponding mitigations for secure deep learning inference. This project expects to advance knowledge of how prediction outputs from secure inference are exploitable, the extent of privacy breaches, and strategies to safeguard output privacy. Expected outcomes of this project include a formal trust model characterising output privacy in secure inference, principled attack methodologies unveiling the risks, lightweight privacy-enhancing mitigation techniques, and a practical system solution for real-world applications. This should provide significant benefits such as facilitating AI-powered industries to uplift their businesses in a secure and trustworthy fashion.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4604 - Cybersecurity and Privacy. Lead: Dr Xiaoning Liu

Australian Partnership for Breakthrough Science in the Advanced LIGO+ Era. Australia is currently a global leader in gravitational-wave astrophysics, through key technological and scientific contributions to the Advanced LIGO+ Observatories located in the USA. Gravitational-wave observatories provide a fundamentally new way to observe the Universe, allowing us to witness and explore the nature of extraordinarily powerful events such as the mergers of binary black holes and neutron stars. In partnership with the USA and UK, we expect to provide crucial enhancements enabling discoveries of hundreds of gravitational wave events per year. The project will maintain Australia's global leadership in the field, and inspire our next generation of scientists and researchers in this exciting domain.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 5101 - Astronomical Sciences. Lead: A/Prof Bram Slagmolen

Budget, procurement and funding

Supporting Tasmania's forestry workers

Measures to assist residential renters

Financial support for small business

Supporting our cultural and creative industries