Grants & Opportunities

Unravelling chiral recognition to improve sensing and separation efficiency. Chiral molecules, analogous to our hands, appear similar but don’t match exactly. Accurate identification of these molecules is crucial as the two different forms can have dramatically different functions, which can mean the difference between a drug helping or harming. This project will explore chiral interactions using an integrated single-entity electrochemistry approach. Investigating these interactions in real-time will reveal fundamental mechanisms of chiral recognition, enabling the ability to control surface chiral affinity. The project will benefit Australia by inventing effective detection and separation technologies for certain chiral molecules, hence improving the purity and efficacy of medicines, agriculture, and food products.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3401 - Analytical Chemistry. Lead: Dr NA KONG

Explainable Fuzz Testing for Software Vulnerability Detection. Fuzz testing (or fuzzing), a widely used method for identifying software vulnerabilities, lacks clear explanations due to its inherent randomness, hampering its core mechanisms' comprehension. This project addresses this gap by enhancing the explainability of fuzzing techniques, a fundamental yet understudied research area. It aims to unravel the core mechanisms behind fuzzing by rigorously applying program analysis techniques.The newfound explainable knowledge will systematically improve existing techniques, validate new approaches, and contribute to educating future software developers, ensuring Australia's secure and high-quality software development landscape. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4612 - Software Engineering. Lead: Dr Yuekang Li

Advancing meta-thermoelectrics through dual-channel phonon engineering. This project aims to develop dual-channel phonon engineering for decreasing thermal conductivity, which can not only deliver new knowledge in heat conduction and phonon transport theories, but also significantly advance meta-thermoelectrics. Expected outcomes include a scalable strategy to obtain thermoelectric materials with ultralow thermal conductivity which boosts the figure-of-merit to over 3.0, and enhanced capacity for modulating microscopic heat conduction that can be deployed in high-density and high-efficiency thermoelectric devices for autonomous power generation and miniaturised heat management. This project will benefit markets of personal electronics and hybrid vehicles and promote Australia’s net zero emission target by 2050.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Dr Meng Li

Emerging blue carbon pathways as natural climate solutions. This project aims to uncover whether two previously-overlooked pathways of the coastal carbon cycle can provide climate mitigation benefits. Using innovative experiments and oceanographic modelling, this project will quantify coastal carbon injection to the deep sea and carbon storage in unvegetated shelf sediments, helping solve outstanding questions regarding the role of coastal vegetated ecosystems in the ocean carbon budget. Project outcomes will deliver robust models for cost-effective carbon accounting, and a tool to verify the climate benefits of managing coastal ecosystems. This will facilitate the development of novel climate mitigation activities, positioning Australia at the leading edge of ocean-based climate action. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4101 - Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation. Lead: Dr Albert Pessarrodona Silvestre

Enhancing residual trapping of CO2 during geological sequestration. The project aims to investigate CO2 trapping in porous media during cyclic CO2-water injection by developing an advanced pore-scale model for multiphase flow. Following validation using 3D-printed micromodels, simulations with a wide range of process parameters will identify conditions for maximum trapping. The project expects to generate new knowledge of the effects of fluid properties and flow conditions on CO2 trapping efficiency and a deeper understanding of how pore geometry and spatial heterogeneity affect multiphase flow processes in porous media. The developed simulation technique and new knowledge will enable enhanced CO2 geologic storage efficiency and reduced risk of leakage and hence wider use of carbon geosequestration.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4012 - Fluid Mechanics and Thermal Engineering. Lead: Dr Zhongzheng Wang

Knowledge Enriched Approach for Effective Personalization. This project aims to integrate the strength of both knowledge and data to generate effective personalization using a novel neural-symbolic machine learning approach. This project expects to solve several challenges in pure data driven approaches (e.g., data sparsity, data bias and lack of transparency) while leveraging the simplicity of heuristic-based approaches. Expected outcomes include a novel neural-symbolic approach for user modelling that is applicable to personalisation problems in a wide range of industries. This is expected to provide significant benefit to public organisations through enabling provision of personalised service by better understanding individual users (e.g., personalized learning and personalized medicine).. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Weiqing Wang

Generative Models for Generalised Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition. This project aims to develop innovative techniques rooted in generative models for more generalised human action recognition using privacy-preserving skeleton sequences. This project expects to contribute new knowledge in data-efficient learning, zero-shot learning, and domain adaptation through the development of novel methods. Expected outcomes of this project include novel techniques for generating skeleton data and enhancing action recognition models, enabling models to recognise unseen actions and adapt to diverse domains with limited training data. This should provide significant benefits to science, society, and the economy nationally and internationally, through various applications such as in autonomous vehicles and healthcare.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4611 - Machine Learning. Lead: Dr Qiuhong Ke

Hydrogen Hub Futures. This project aims to assist Australia’s developing hydrogen industry deliver its potential decarbonization, economic and social benefits, by critically examining the hydrogen hub model and its impact on regional communities. This project expects to generate new knowledge by being the first ethnographic study of Australia’s emerging hydrogen industry. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced understanding of the consequences of the hydrogen hub model and its impacts for regional communities, theoretical development in the social sciences of industrial decarbonisation, a documentary film for research dissemination, and policy recommendations for hydrogen development planning that take into account community concerns and desires. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4401 - Anthropology. Lead: Dr Kari Dahlgren

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

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

Engineering the Future: Safety Risk Intelligence in Early Childhood. Knowing how safety risk intelligence develops and is used in practice has become increasingly important for keeping people safe at work. This study aims to investigate children’s capacity to read their environment for risks, engineer solutions to problems presented, and develop safety risk intelligence. Bringing imagination, play and engineering together in a SeeMore Engineering PlayWorld is an innovative approach for researching safety risk intelligence that offers different insights for pioneering future research in workforce safety. An intended outcome of the project is for robust empirical evidence to be generated; significantly contributing to the development of safety standards and evidence-informed practice for engineering education.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 3901 - Curriculum and Pedagogy. Lead: Em/Prof Marilyn Fleer

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

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

Oceanic Oxygen in Deep Time: Have We Been Looking in the Wrong Places? Dissolved marine oxygen supports animal life and controls the distribution of redox-sensitive critical metals. Yet the evolution of oceanic dissolved oxygen, when complex cells evolved and links to major critical metal deposits are poorly known—largely because existing studies are from rocks formed in the same Baltic-like sea 1.5 billion years ago (as revealed by new plate-tectonic reconstructions). We will address this by studying ancient rocks that formed in different oceans (rocks now in WA & India). Geochemistry, geochronology and biogeochemical modelling are used to build paleogeographic maps of ocean redox to benefit Australia by understanding the conditions that led to the proliferation of complex cells and critical metal deposits.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3703 - Geochemistry. Lead: Prof Alan Collins

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

Radiation-Driven Turbulence and Star Formation. This project aims to determine how radiation-driven turbulence controls the formation of stars. The expected outcomes are the most accurate radiation-hydrodynamical method to date, and the most detailed simulations of radiation-driven turbulence conducted at the NIF laser. This project will transform our understanding of these fundamental processes, providing crucial input for Australian and international facilities and surveys, and for models of galaxy, star and planet formation. Further key benefits of this project are the training of Australia's future generation of Big Data analysts, and the development of interdisciplinary tools involving Plasma and High-Energy Physics, Chemical Modelling, Statistics, and High Performance Computing.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 5101 - Astronomical Sciences. Lead: Prof Christoph Federrath

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

Uncovering Mesostructures in Additively Manufactured Aluminum Alloys. Metal additive manufacturing of aluminium alloys has shown a great promise for various applications in many key industries including aerospace, transportation, defence, etc. However, a huge knowledge gap exists in understanding and controlling the widely observed large variation in mechanical properties in the additively manufactured aluminium alloys. Therefore, this project aims to introduce machine learning and in-situ monitoring to develop a new approach to investigate the process-bonding structure-property relationships in additively manufactured aluminium alloys. The outcomes of this project will fill the critical knowledge gap and open new opportunities for wider applications of additive manufacturing of aluminium alloys.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Xiaopeng Li

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