Grants & Opportunities

Child Citizens: Young People and Australian Democracy since 1945. This project provides a new account of Australian democracy from the perspective of children and young people. It tracks changes in children’s conceptions and practices of citizenship since 1945 to explain their contested status in contemporary politics. Far from simply being ‘citizens in waiting’, the project shows that young people have long been active participants in political and civic life and reveals how their citizenship claims have expanded across this period, alongside those of other marginalised groups. Its findings will add nuance to current debates about children’s political exclusion, with its social impact enhanced through the development of an online research portal and collaboration with the Museum of Australian Democracy.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4303 - Historical Studies. Lead: Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering

Barking up the right trees – A microbial solution for our methane problem. This project aims to unveil the microbial diversity and metabolic capabilities of bark-dwelling microbial communities in Australian forests. Trees perform an important climatic function in sequestering atmospheric carbon, however the role of tree bark-associated microbiome in regulating other climate-active trace gasses such as methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide is unknown. Combining cutting-edge molecular and biogeochemical approaches, this project aims to characterise and quantify trace gas oxidation rates of forest bark microbiome. The anticipated outcomes include fundamental knowledge surrounding bark-associated microbial trace gas oxidation within global biogeochemical cycles, and insights into their response to climatic variables.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4105 - Pollution and Contamination. Lead: Dr Luke Jeffrey

Unravelling the pathways of methane production and oxidation in mangroves. This project addresses a long-standing conundrum of why high methane emissions are sustained in saline coastal wetlands by identifying and quantifying methane production and oxidation processes in mangrove ecosystems. Using a novel combination of cutting-edge instrumentation for greenhouse gases, radiocarbon/stable isotope analysis, this project will generate a first complete picture of the mangrove methane cycle, to accurately quantify, for the first time, Australia’s contribution to global coastal mangrove emissions. The outcomes will establish currently lacking fundamental understanding of wetland methane cycling, advance global biogeochemical models, and improve strategies for natural climate solutions of coastal wetlands in Australia.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3703 - Geochemistry. Lead: A/Prof Judith Rosentreter

Beyond Imported Understandings of Domestic Violence in the Pacific. High occurrences of domestic violence across the Pacific region threatens the growth and development of all sectors. This project aims to investigate local understandings of the causes, manifestations, and best-suited responses to the problem in the Pacific. It advances a study of local stakeholder’s perspectives of domestic violence in two of the least developed Pacific Island countries to generate non-Western, context-specific insight into developing policies and practices to inform improved frontline responses. Expected outcomes include the development of an evidence base to inform contextually appropriate and innovative responses to domestic violence, with benefits to islander/indigenous communities and economies in Oceania.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4513 - Pacific Peoples Culture, Language and History. Lead: Dr Danielle Watson

Sensory and bioengineering approaches to predict hearing abilities in fish. This project aims to understand the factors responsible for the extraordinary diversity in the shape and size of fish ears and why some fishes are more sensitive to sound than others, which is little understood. Using innovative techniques and a multidisciplinary approach, expected outcomes of this project include the first model representing the hearing function of fish underwater. This may allow unique insights into the importance of sound for fish, as well as inspire the development of new sensor technologies, including in robotics and biomedical applications. Benefits include the ability to predict the vulnerability of a fish species to noise pollution and to inform conservation strategies and policy guidelines.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3104 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: Dr Lucille Chapuis

Engineering microenvironments to regulate osteocyte 3D networks in vitro. Most knowledge of bone is based on only a fraction of cells found in bone because the majority of cells in our bones (called osteocyte cell networks) cannot easily be grown or studied outside the body. This results in the inability to understand how the bone organ functions. Using bioinspired engineering, this project will use advanced biomaterials to biofabricate, for the first time, osteocyte cell networks in vitro. By unravelling how they are formed and controlled by manipulating their microenvironment, we will discover how different types of bones are formed. The benefits will be a valuable tool for the bone research community, allowing unresolved questions to be addressed in the future, such as how bone forms, repairs, and remodels.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4003 - Biomedical Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Nathalie Bock

On the wealth of First Nations: Examining the Indigenous-settler wealth gap. This project aims to revise understandings of First Nations economic circumstances by investigating disparities between First Nations and non-Indigenous financial wealth. It expects to generate knowledge of the size of the ‘wealth gap’ and identify the structures that cause its contemporary reproduction and analyse policy options to address these disparities. Expected outcomes of the project include new knowledge about the Indigenous-settler wealth gap and the development of a research literature on approaches to addressing the wealth gap in Australia. This should provide significant benefits including a clearer understanding of the nature and causes of economic disparities between First Nations and non-Indigenous people in Australia.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4406 - Human Geography. Lead: Dr Francis Markham

Evaluating the Impact and Efficiency of Engineering the Ocean to Remove CO2. This project aims to evaluate the viability of engineering the ocean to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by simulating a suite of climate intervention and baseline scenarios. To better predict changes in marine carbon cycling, I will first make novel observations of zooplankton grazing dynamics, then use them to improve, validate and constrain a new marine biogeochemical model. Using this model, coupled to an ocean, atmosphere and fisheries model, I will quantify the long-term efficiency with which marine carbon dioxide removal strategies sequester carbon along with their impact on fisheries catch. These projections will help scientists, policy-makers, and industry leaders decide if, when, and how we should geoengineer the ocean. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3708 - Oceanography. Lead: Dr Tyler Rohr

The Great Exhibitions and their Lost Indigenous Objects . This project will rediscover the Australian Indigenous objects sent overseas to the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such objects acted as powerful forms of cultural, political and economic display, and a form of imperial and colonial projection. It will excavate the hidden histories of Indigenous people involved in these events and the many objects lost to Australia. Through collaborative work at community dialogues, the project will repatriate knowledge and remake connections between objects, museums, and Indigenous people. In doing so, it will bring contemporary Indigenous perspectives to global attention, generate new exhibition possibilities and influence international museum practice.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: Prof Gaye Sculthorpe

Advancing plant synthetic gene circuit capability, robustness, and use. This project aims to advance our ability to control gene expression in plants using synthetic gene circuits. By expanding the toolkit and optimizing circuit components, we aim to achieve more complex capabilities and robust implementation. Furthermore, we will apply gene circuit technologies to enhance plant frost tolerance. The expected project outcomes include a significant advance in gene circuit capabilities, a better understanding of their behavior in plant cells, and the ability to use them to confer advantageous traits. The benefits of this research include new plant biotechnology tools that will underpin future crop yield improvements, and advances in plant-based pharmaceuticals and materials.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Lead: Prof Ryan Lister

Digitally-Integrated Smart Sensing of Diverse Airborne Grass Pollen Sources. Grass pollen is the main outdoor allergen source globally, triggering hayfever and asthma in up to 500 million people. With over 10,000 species, the influence of grass type, location and climate on pollen in the air is not yet known. This is a key issue since subtropical and temperate grasses differ in response to environmental factors. The project aims to use artificial intelligence on digital camera images to learn to see local grass flowers and integrate this with air sensors trained to detect grass pollen types. The expected outcomes are new capacities to track airborne grass pollen types. These outcomes can transform how pollen can be monitored to reduce the burden of allergies, and provide evidence of changing airborne pollen loads. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4104 - Environmental Management. Lead: Prof Janet Davies

Learning to Reason in Reinforcement Learning. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) uses deep neural networks to represent and learn optimal decision-making policies for intelligent agents in complex environments. However, most RL approaches require millions of episodes to converge to good policies, making it difficult for RL to be applied in real-world scenarios taking significant resources. This project aims to equip RL with capabilities such as counterfactual reasoning and outcome anticipation to significantly reduce the number of interactions required, improve generalisation, and provide the agent with the capability to consider the cause-effects. These improvements would narrow the gap between AI and human capabilities and broaden the adoption of RL in real-world applications.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4611 - Machine Learning. Lead: A/Prof Ehsan Abbasnejad

What is the role of striatal dopamine in value-based decision-making? The aim of this project is to understand the role of dopamine in the brain circuits controlling goal-directed action. Its significance lies in our use of newly developed tools to measure dopamine release and cellular activity concurrently to assess the causal role of this interaction in choice and decision-making. The expected outcome of this project is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of dopamine release in striatal cellular activity and in the psychological processes mediating goal-directed decision-making. This outcome will have the benefit of filling a gap in our knowledge of the brain processes mediating decision-making, a fundamental capacity that contributes to our physical and psychological wellbeing (wellness). . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 5202 - Biological Psychology. Lead: Prof Bernard Balleine

Intraepithelial lymphocyte development and function in the intestine. This study aims to better understand the homeostatic maintenance and essential repair processes in the intestine. This project will generate new knowledge of how immune cells of the intestine, known as intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs), engage with intestinal epithelial cells, neurons and commensal microbes to promote homeostasis and repair. Expected outcomes of this project will be identification of new molecules for future drug and vaccine development to improve gut health and vaccination in mammals. This should provide significant benefits to the Australian population and livestock industry through improved protection against cancer, intestinal infections and increased productivity. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3204 - Immunology. Lead: A/Prof Lisa Mielke

(Re)Designing Digital Justice. This project aims to address the challenge of (re)designing novel online court systems by introducing a human-centred design process to the legal process. This project will generate fundamental new knowledge in respect of how to effectively design an inclusive justice system, bridging the gap between the legal system and human-computer interaction. Expected outcomes include how to use technology to implement a more just, efficient, and fair legal system, which is accessible to all Australians. This should provide significant benefits for both Australian society and the legal system.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4608 - Human-Centred Computing. Lead: Prof Patrick Olivier

Understanding mosquito smell system: a new frontier in mosquito control. This project aims to identify and functionally investigate mosquito smell receptors, which are critical in detecting volatile compounds and locating their hosts from a considerable distance away. Mosquitoes display preferences for certain hosts over others, primarily determined by volatile chemicals produced by hosts. This study builds on recently discovered, novel, host-derived volatile compounds, which can elicit robust responses and attractiveness from mosquitoes. Expected outcomes of the project are enhanced understanding of mosquito smell system and behaviours. This could provide significant benefits to how we can fight mosquitoes and mosquito-transmitted diseases in a more efficient and environmentally responsible way.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3109 - Zoology. Lead: Dr Wei Xu

How lipid binding proteins shape the activity of nuclear hormone receptors. This project aims to explore how a family of lipid binding proteins control organ specific activation of nuclear receptors – receptors that play a key role in generating energy and are critical for life. The project will employ chemical, molecular, cell biology approaches to generate new knowledge about lipid binding protein-receptor interactions and how these complexes dictate receptor activation. The outcomes could provide a roadmap to design drugs that interact with the right protein in the right tissue and in doing so dramatically enhance drug specificity. This will benefit the success of drug treatments which require stimulation of a therapeutic response at a target site, and avoidance of potentially toxic activity at other locations.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3214 - Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Lead: A/Prof Michelle Halls

Sustainable Electrocatalytic Synthesis of Urea. Urea is a critical chemical for agriculture, the chemical industry and pollution control, yet current production methods are unsustainable. This project aims to design high-efficiency catalysts for electrochemical urea synthesis from theoretical studies. This project expects to generate new knowledge of chemistry and catalysis from new reaction mechanisms and materials. Expected outcomes include optimum catalysts with high conversion efficiency and reactant selectivity. The novel catalysts have the potential to deliver improved catalytic performance and controllable reaction reactants. This could deliver significant benefits to the crop production increase, cost reduction of chemical industry, and environmental pollution reduction.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Prof Liangzhi Kou

Impact of roughness on adverse pressure gradient turbulent boundary layers. This project aims to develop a novel technique for measuring time-resolved fluid velocity vector fields in high-speed flows to investigate rough wall turbulence in adverse pressure gradient environments in unprecedented detail. By using this innovative instrument to study these widespread but poorly understood turbulent flows in power generation and transport, the project seeks to generate new knowledge. Expected outcomes include the development of a new instrument and fundamental knowledge leading to improved designs with higher efficiencies in power generation and transport, resulting in significant benefits such as increased energy security, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and improved quality of life for individuals and society.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4012 - Fluid Mechanics and Thermal Engineering. Lead: Prof Julio Soria

Australian Experiences of Algorithmic Culture on TikTok. This project is the first to systematically investigate how algorithmic content recommendation is shaping everyday Australian cultural experience over time, in the particular context of TikTok—the digital platform where Australians spend the most time online. The project provides critical evidence to support the government's ongoing policy initiatives intended to regulate the activities of digital platforms. Its methodological innovations directly address the challenges of studying commercial platforms' recommender systems through a mixed-method research design combining computational and qualitative analysis, bridging universal and individual perspectives and introducing ‘citizen science’ approaches to the field of platform studies.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4701 - Communication and Media Studies. Lead: Prof Patrik Wikstrom

Novel Membranes for High-performance Zinc-Iron Redox Flow Batteries. Membrane is a critical component in zinc-iron redox flow battery (ZIRFB) which is considered a promising technology for large-scale energy storage in the future. This project aims to design and construct high performance membranes using low-cost polymers and nanostructured carbon materials through functionalization and innovative membrane structure design. The goal is to develop cost-effective membranes that possess high ion-selectivity and ion conductivity as well as stability that are required to fabricate high performance, long cycle lifetime ZIRFB. Successful achievement of the outcomes will enable cost-effective, reliable ZIRFB, placing Australia at the forefront of exploiting flow batteries based clean energy storage technologies. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Dr Jiaye Ye

Fitness and evolutionary consequences of developmental plasticity. This project aims to develop a framework for accurately predicting species responses to global change. Phenotypic plasticity will act as a rapid-response mechanism, enabling organisms to survive climatic shifts in the first instance. Understanding how and when plasticity underpins species’ persistence under climate change is lacking. This project aims to integrate developmental responses to environmental change with evolutionary adaptation and population persistence in a spatially explicit context. The intended outcome is a powerful and general tool for predicting the impact of environmental change on the distribution and abundance of organisms. Benefits include improved conservation outcomes and better control of pest/disease vectors.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3104 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: Prof Carla Sgro

Fire-retardant Solid State Electrolytes for Rechargeable Li-ion Batteries. This project aims to develop solid-state composite electrolytes combining exceptional flame retardancy and high ion conductivity for lithium-ion batteries. By leveraging merits of both polymer and ceramic electrolytes, the resultant composite electrolytes are expected to enhance battery safety by replacing existing flammable liquid counterparts. The project will advance the knowledge on the design and optimization of solid-state electrolytes, and the understanding on the fire-retarding and ionic conducting mechanisms of composite electrolytes. The outcomes of this project will contribute to the reduction of battery fires, the skills development in the Australian battery industry, and the advancement of a sustainable carbon-zero economy.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3403 - Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry. Lead: Prof Ziqi Sun

Unravelling Efficient Nucleic Acid Delivery Using Multilayer Nanoparticles. Developing smarter nanoparticles is critical for maximising the potential of biological therapeutics such as nucleic acids. Currently, the efficiency of nanoparticle delivery remains low due to the inability of carriers to migrate different biological regions. The aim of this project is to develop responsive polymer nanoparticles that can more effectively migrate cell barriers by a two-staged release based on the combination of different self-immolative polymers. This project will allow the development of design rules for understanding how nanoparticle structure can be optimised to improve nucleic acid delivery. This work will have important benefits such as developing new nanotechnology industry and skilled graduates for Australia. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3403 - Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry. Lead: Prof Georgina Such

Some like it hot: the genetics of rapid adaptation to climate change. This project investigates the genetics of rapid evolutionary adaptation by utilising genomes sampled over unparalleled temporal and spatial scales in a highly invasive and agriculturally significant weed. This project expects to generate new knowledge about the genetic mechanisms that facilitate adaptation to climate change by developing new theory and genomic predictions, and then testing them under realistic field conditions. Expected outcomes include a deeper understanding of the genetic basis of adaptation, and a powerful framework to predict the evolutionary consequences of climate change. This should provide significant benefits, including improved capacity to anticipate the effects of climate change on noxious and threatened species.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3104 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: A/Prof Kathryn Hodgins