Grants & Opportunities

Justice in AI-driven Conservation: Repairing Nature with Care Practices. This project aims to investigate how artificial intelligence for biodiversity assessments can embrace justice practices to achieve Australia’s conservation targets. This project expands theoretical knowledge and participatory methods in the area of digital technologies for conservation decision-making by advancing responsible innovation frameworks. Expected outcomes include a novel legitimacy approach alongside guidance on digital care practices for algorithmic biodiversity monitoring and reporting, ensuring the ethical implementation of the nature repair market. This should provide benefits that position Australia as a global leader in justice-oriented technologies for responsive and adaptive environmental policymaking and practices.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4406 - Human Geography. Lead: Dr Danilo Urzedo

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

Universal uncertainty quantification using deep learning. This project aims to develop a new and universal approach to uncertainty quantification using deep learning. This project expects to use innovative deep learning tools to develop the first simultaneously tractable and expressive models that can be used directly to quantify uncertainty, a significant unsolved problem. Expected outcomes of this project include a general framework for directly quantifying uncertainty, surpassing current methods which are unable to use big data or are indirect, slow, inexact or inexpressive. This should provide significant benefits for trusted uncertainty quantification using deep learning, with demonstrated downstream applications in manufacturing and coastal bathymetry.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4611 - Machine Learning. Lead: Dr Russell Tsuchida

The evolution of dispersal at invasive range edges. Dispersal rate determines how rapidly invasive species expand their range. At expanding range edges, evolution consistently increases dispersal rate, accelerating invasion speed. But can dispersal evolution also limit range expansion? Focusing on cane toads—one of Australia’s most damaging invaders—at a newly formed arid range edge, my project will test the novel hypothesis that dispersal evolution stabilises range edges and, thus, constrains the spread of invaders. Expected outcomes include resolving longstanding questions about how evolution shapes species distributions and structures range edges—with broad benefits through the development of innovative, science-driven strategies to halt the spread of invaders.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3104 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: Dr Chris Jolly

Informal sexuality and civics education pedagogies of LGBTQ+ youth. This project explores how LGBTQ+ young people’s everyday social media use can be leveraged to enhance the wellbeing benefits of sexuality and civics education. This project employs a novel qualitative research design to provide vital insight into the beneficial online teaching and learning practices of LGBTQ+ youth on topics concerning health, sexuality and civics amid increasing political polarisation. This research will show how these informal pedagogies can complement school-based teaching. Outcomes include guidance for teachers to assist in delivering sexuality and civics education that is contextually relevant to young people’s modern lives, cultivating LGBTQ+ inclusion while enhancing health and wellbeing benefits for all students.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3904 - Specialist Studies In Education. Lead: Dr Barrie Shannon

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

Photochemistry Mass Spectrometry Facility. Development of next-generation chemicals and materials requires concurrent advances in molecular characterisation technologies. This proposal aims to establish the first mass spectrometer in Australia dedicated to the detailed characterisation of light-responsive molecules and polymer materials. With unique capacity to initiate photochemical transformations on-demand, this novel and bespoke platform will elucidate molecular structure in real time with unparalleled specificity and sensitivity. Servicing an interdisciplinary research team, the platform will deepen our comprehension of light-matter interactions at a molecular scale, and accelerate transformative advances in applications across chemical, atmospheric, and materials sciences.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3401 - Analytical Chemistry. Lead: Dr David Marshall

Australian Optical Dating and Archaeological Luminescence Facility: AusOpAL. AusOpAL aims to transform our understanding of human evolution and past human interactions using next-generation innovations in luminescence dating. It addresses significant limitations in the scope and capacity of the national geochronology portfolio, unlocking Australian-first capabilities in emergent feldspar and quartz dating techniques and direct dating of archaeological materials such as stone tools. Expected outcomes include benchmark reconstructions of past human dispersals and cultures, advances in dating reliability and training of future geoscience expertise. This will provide important benefits for improved temporal appraisals of human history, including timing of human settlement and causes of megafauna extinction in Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 4301 - Archaeology. Lead: A/Prof Lee Arnold

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

This funding is to support the industry in continuing to provide vital accessible transport options for people with reduced mobility by assisting with the cost of replacing older and written-off wheelchair accessible taxis.

The program has funding available for eligible sport, active recreation and racing organisations located in areas declared under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA). Assistance will be available where Personal Hardship Assistance (Category A) or Restoration of Essential Public Assets (Category B) are listed. Eligible organisations outside of declared Local Government Areas affected by a disaster event are asked to contact the Department of Sport, Racing and Olympic and Paralympic Games (DSROPG) to determine their eligibility for funding.

To provide vouchers of $150 to provide greater access to learn to swim classes for children aged 0 to 4 years to reduce the financial burden on low-income families

To provide financial assistance to young athletes, coaches and officials selected to attend state, national and international level events to enhance development pathways for Queenslanders