Grants & Opportunities

Inclusive memories: tracing democratic practices in contemporary memorials. This project aims to investigate the significant role of recent public memorials in reflecting and shaping democratic identity, memory, values and engagement in Australia and internationally. The project expects to advance knowledge through an innovative international comparison of the evolving diversity of democratic themes, designs and procurement approaches used for public memorials and public spaces. Expected outcomes include practical and scholarly insights into how these processes can improve social engagement and inclusion. The project’s benefits include improving decision-making processes for public art, public space and heritage, and expanding scholarly and public awareness about Australian history, identity and democratic values. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1205 - Urban and Regional Planning. Lead: Prof Quentin Stevens

Topological stability from spectral analysis. The aim is to use mathematical scattering theory to find and study new topological features of the spectra of linear transformations on Hilbert space. The significance derives from mathematical models of low temperature conducting quantum materials. These have revealed `topological phases of matter' that are stable with respect to a range of variations in the parameters that determine the system. The stability is desired for applications to quantum devices. Our results will give topological stability from the scattering spectrum, a feature not previously seen. The benefits stem from new results in mathematical scattering theory with a primary novelty being the analysis of ``zero energy resonances'' in mathematical models of graphene.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0101 - Pure Mathematics. Lead: Prof Adam Rennie

Weight stigma in the preconception, pregnancy and postpartum periods. The overall aim of this project is to develop guidance for the translation of weight stigma evidence into preconception, pregnancy and postpartum obesity-related policy. It focuses on the socio-ecological factors that perpetuate weight stigma in women across the reproductive life phase, that is, in women planning a pregnancy, in women who are pregnant and in mothers who have given birth within a 24-month period. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1117 - Public Health and Health Services. Lead: Dr Briony Hill

Understanding macroeconomic fluctuations with unobserved networks. Whilst empirical evidence suggests that firm-level shocks can have large aggregate effects, via network connections, macroeconomic policies have mostly an aggregate nature. This project aims to build a new framework to disentangle aggregate shocks from shocks to individual units. The major innovations are i) to infer the network from the data and ii) to jointly estimate aggregate factors and network effects. Expected outcomes are i) measures of systemic risk and ii) a theoretical framework to study the optimality of aggregate versus sectoral stabilization policies. Benefits include a better understanding of macroeconomic fluctuations in Australia and proposed economic policies to mitigate large and persistent declines in employment and GDP.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1402 - Applied Economics. Lead: Prof Valentyn Panchenko

Democratisation of Deep Learning: Neural Architecture Search at Low Cost. The need to manually design Deep Learning-based Neural Networks (DNNs) limits their usage to AI experts and hinders the exploitation of their true potential more broadly, e.g., in farming, humanities. We aim to replace this tedious process through novel AI methods capable of generating DNNs that can perform significantly better and at a lower computational cost than manually designed DNNs. We further expand this idea to solve complex real-world problems with both labelled and unlabelled data found in various applications including energy and climate change. The expected outcomes include the novel AI methods, highly trained AI researchers and a number of critical applications that will bring significant benefits to Australia and the world.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0801 - Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing. Lead: Prof Saman Halgamuge

How inequalities affect attitudes and behaviours concerning sex and gender. This project addresses how economic inequalities—between and within the sexes—shape behaviour, gender sentiment, and violence both online and ‘in real life’. The research brings evolutionary understandings of sexual marketplaces together with the psychology of social behaviour, to shed new light on the origins of sexual conflict and harmful gender ideologies. This project integrates within-individual variation, careful experimental dissection of the sources of inequality, and the study of large-scale (among cities, among countries) patterns of behaviour on social media. A fuller understanding of how and why inequalities affect behaviour presents opportunities for improved social policy and responses to gendered violence and cyberhate.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1701 - Psychology. Lead: Prof Robert Brooks

Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning for Secure and Decentralised Learning. This project aims to develop novel blockchain-enabled federated learning techniques for secure and decentralised learning. It addresses an important and urgent machine learning problem, that is, the data useful for training machine learning models are often held by different owners who are not willing to share their data due to privacy concerns, resulting in isolated data islands. The project will result in a set of innovative algorithms that provide solutions to the key challenges in blockchain-enabled federated learning. The expected outcomes of the project will dramatically advance the frontier of machine learning and blockchain research, and have massive social and economic benefits for Australia and international communities.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0805 - Distributed Computing. Lead: Prof Yong Xiang

Body, Language and Socialisation across Cultures. This project aims to advance the understanding of how people learn languages, and in the process become socialized into particular cultures and communities. To that end, it will bring together an international team of leading experts in the field, and focus in new ways on the interplay of speech and sign with other bodily forms of communication in a wide variety of cultures. Expected outcomes include improved understanding of multimodal communication and language socialization, and enhancement of Australian research capacity in these fields. This should lead to significant practical benefits, improving Australia's ability to adapt to cultural diversity and to counteract its disadvantages in schools and everyday life.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1601 - Anthropology. Lead: Em/Prof Alan Rumsey

The emotional face: What determines preferential expression processing. The processing of facial expressions of emotion is essential for successful social functioning. However, we still lack a good understanding of key factors that facilitate or impede the processing of these important social signals. The current project aims to address this knowledge gap by providing a) a more rigorous test of the currently dominant account of expression processing, the evaluative congruence account, and delineating how b) contextual factors and c) person knowledge affect expression processing. The research aims to advance our understanding of facial expression processing, to build international collaborations, and to train the next generation of emotion scientists.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1701 - Psychology. Lead: Prof Ottmar Lipp

Molecular Thermoelectric Materials: A New Hot Topic. This project aims to use the principles of chemistry and molecular electronics to synthesize and study molecules able to directly convert waste heat into electricity through the Seebeck effect. This project expects to generate new knowledge concerning the wire-like properties of molecules and conditions that lead to a high Seebeck coefficient, together with interference effects to suppress thermal conductance. Expected outcomes of this project include a deeper understanding of chemical structure - molecular electronic property relationships, and enhanced international collaboration with the UK. This should provide benefits in terms of low-cost conversion of waste heat to electrical energy. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1007 - Nanotechnology. Lead: Prof Paul Low

Judges' work, place and psychological health - a national view. This project aims to address the human, juridical and financial costs of judicial officers’ work-related psychological harm. This harm is implicated in early retirement, sick leave and suicide. It threatens appropriate courtroom conduct, procedural fairness and impartial adjudication. The project seeks to generate new knowledge of the stress judicial officers experience and the individual and institutional mechanisms for managing stressors, combining socio-legal and psychological approaches. Expected outcomes include evidence-based understandings to inform recruitment and retention strategies specific to this highly specialized workforce. This should provide significant benefits for judges’ work capacities and courts' delivery of justice.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1801 - Law. Lead: Prof Prudence Vines

Medium temperature electrolysis for low-cost carbon dioxide utilization. Carbon dioxide is a notorious greenhouse gas. Its capture, and subsequent storage or utilization, is a major focus not only for researchers, but also for governments trying to meet their obligations of the Paris Agreement on climate change and for industries managing their legal and social responsibilities. This project aims to develop commercially viable medium temperature electrolysers to convert carbon dioxide into value added chemicals using electricity from renewable sources. New design principles will be developed to generate highly active and selective catalysts with long-term stability. These electrolyzers will be integrated with carbon capture technologies to directly utilize captured carbon dioxide with high energy efficiency.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0306 - Physical Chemistry (Incl. Structural). Lead: A/Prof Jie Zhang

Public Interest Advocacy in Australian Policymaking. The project aims to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of public interest advocacy, via the media, in elevating the responsiveness of elected political elites. The project expects to generate new knowledge about how the advocacy and media agendas are set, examine the way elected elites access and ingest news media, and conditions under which advocacy groups access to news changes political priorities. It is expected that the project will provide an evidence base for citizens and policy makers to assess the effectiveness of public interest advocacy, and deliver benefits such as strengthening the quality of Australia’s representative democracy, and offer scholars new theories on the role of public interest advocacy on policy priorities.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 1606 - Political Science. Lead: Prof Darren Halpin

Reducing environmental footprint by improving phosphorous use efficiency. While modern agriculture relies heavily on the use of phosphorous fertilizers, most of them are not used by plants and lost in runoff, resulting in a massive environmental damage through contamination of waterways (termed eutrophication). This project takes advantage of an untapped resource - a unique collection of Tibetan wild barley genotypes, to reveal key traits that confer superior phosphorus use efficiency in wild barley and identify appropriate candidate genes and their position on chromosomes for further incorporating these traits into commercial barley cultivars. This will reduce the environmental footprint of modern agricultural practices on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems without compromising food security.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0607 - Plant Biology. Lead: Prof Sergey Shabala

Cryobiotechnology innovations to help fight the Myrtle rust pandemic. This project aims to mitigate the impacts of Myrtle rust, a disease affecting >380 Australian taxa in the family Myrtaceae, by developing advanced techniques to conserve susceptible species. The project is expected to generate the biotechnology advances necessary to conserve multiple taxa on the brink of extinction, including species important to our emerging native botanicals industry. Expected outcomes for the project include novel protocols for initiating and maintaining sterile tissue cultures and advanced techniques for cryopreservation of susceptible species, providing insurance against extinction and sources of ex situ material for re-establishing the species in safe sites and for research into disease resistance. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0502 - Environmental Science and Management. Lead: Prof Ricardo Mancera

Developing a novel carbon negative fertiliser . Food security is vital to support our growing population. However, our increasing reliance on intensive farming systems necessitates increased fertiliser use, leading to increased water pollution and soil degradation - threatening both the Australian environment and food security. Increasing carbon storage capacity by soil and decreasing fertiliser use are two of the primary pathways for restoring the bio-support capacity of soils and reducing farming footprints. This innovative and first-of-its-kind project aims to develop a cost-effective, carbon negative fertiliser that reduces fertiliser inputs and increases soil carbon storage. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0503 - Soil Sciences. Lead: A/Prof Shahla Hosseini Bai

Bluebottle dynamics: towards a prediction tool for Surf Life Saving Aust. Many Australians have had a painful bluebottle sting, yet little is known about bluebottles and what brings them to the coast. This project will shed new light on bluebottle dynamics, pathways, and distribution of the beachings. We will use an innovative combination of lab work, ocean surveys, statistical and hydrodynamic modelling to fill knowledge gaps and ultimately provide the framework for prediction. In partnership with Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA), we will develop the first bluebottle risk prediction tool for our popular beaches. Forewarned is forearmed. Forecasts will help mitigate bluebottle stings, lessen their public health burden, while having broad benefits for coastal communities. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0405 - Oceanography. Lead: A/Prof Amandine Schaeffer

High-value functional ingredients from bean processing waste. Legumes are considered highly nutritious and sustainable food. Accordingly, there is a steady growth in the consumption of legumes worldwide, including in Australia. Due to lengthy soaking and cooking times, consumers prefer ready-to-eat canned legumes. The current processing technologies are energy and water-intensive and generate considerable waste. This project investigates the application of non-thermal technologies to reduce processing time, water and energy use and enable the recovery of valuable polyphenols and soluble dietary fibres normally lost in the wastewater. This knowledge will lead to sustainable beans processing, delivering improved productivity to Australian manufacturers and quality food to Australian consumers.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0908 - Food Sciences. Lead: A/Prof Sushil Dhital

ARC Research Hub for Carbon Utilisation and Recycling. This Research Hub aims to develop technologies to transform carbon dioxide emissions from our energy and manufacturing sectors into valuable products and create pathways to market to drive industry transformation. This hub aims to achieve this by developing novel electro, thermo, and biochemical methods for converting CO2 from sectors that cannot easily avoid emissions and a technological pathway for CO2 recycling. The outcomes of this Hub are likely to be transformative for industry, the economy, and society in moving the fate of CO2 from pollutant to feedstock. The benefits to Australia are intended to be the stimulation of a new industry, a skilled workforce for this emerging industry and a contribution to meeting CO2 reduction targets.. Scheme: Industrial Transformation Research Hubs. Field: 4004 - Chemical Engineering. Lead: Prof Paul Webley

ARC Training Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection Transmission. The aim of the Centre is to engineer building systems whose elements work together to reduce airborne infection transmission by improving indoor air quality while maintaining comfort and efficiency. The significance is in establishing clean indoor air as the norm, with Australian industry being the forerunner in this process. The outcomes include new intelligent building systems, improved building technologies, quantitative methods for building control, evidence for policymaking and recommendations for operational guidelines. Wide-ranging benefits include reducing the health and economic burden of inadequate indoor air and increasing the competitiveness of Australian industry in the face of increasing demand for next-level building systems.. Scheme: Industrial Transformation Training Centres. Field: 4010 - Engineering Practice and Education. Lead: Prof Lidia Morawska

Nurturing Australia's Little Multilingual Minds. Despite its substantial multilingual capacity of more than 300 languages, Australia has been described as a 'graveyard for languages'. In partnering with community organisations we will facilitate polyglot early learning, commencing with Spanish and Vietnamese. Expected outcomes are a deep understanding of multilingual families’ experiences, a model to support lifespan multilingual education, and openly-accessible database of child language in heritage languages. Benefits include a pivotal contribution to early childhood education with the creation of a tailor-made, principle-based program, which will enhance children’s academic achievement, familial social and mental wellbeing, and cultural and economic opportunities for all Australians. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 1702 - Cognitive Sciences. Lead: Prof Paola Escudero

Transforming Cultural & Natural Resource Management workforce capabilities. This project aims to implement a transformative program of transdisciplinary cultural and natural resource management and workforce development research in Northern Australia’s Arnhem Plateau region. This project expects to create new knowledge in the areas of cultural knowledges, wildfire, feral animal, invasive plants, mine-site rehabilitation, and climate change, as well as Indigenous training effectiveness. Expected outcomes of the project include practical learnings for application in broader Indigenous community/First Nations capability and supportive policy development contexts. The expected benefits are a long-term platform for enhancing cultural and environmental landscape management and sustainable employment opportunities.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0502 - Environmental Science and Management. Lead: Prof Jeremy Russell-Smith

My Air Space: the Science of Buildings that Make us Thrive. Nothing is more necessary in human life than the air we breathe, mostly indoors where air quality has been relatively overlooked. This project aims to deliver new science and technology as a foundation for optimising indoor atmospheres to improve health, wellbeing, and comfort. Expected outcomes include innovative, efficient, low-cost diagnostic sensing of indoor atmospheres and human–space interactions, real-time detection of airborne pathogens and particles that host them, and cost-effective localised conditioning of spaces for comfort at points of actual use. Benefits should be seen in areas of health, productivity, reduced energy use, and new industries for the design, modernising, and operation of buildings across Australia and beyond.. Scheme: Australian Laureate Fellowships. Field: 4010 - Engineering Practice and Education. Lead: Prof Lidia Morawska

The many lives and deaths of high redshift massive quiescent galaxies. This Fellowship will investigate the recent discovery of very massive, extremely early forming quiescent galaxies and explain their exceptional origin, death, and ultimate place in the local Universe. It is a multidisciplinary project that seeks to produce new knowledge using high-performance computing, software engineering, and sophisticated data analysis techniques. Expected outcomes include novel and improved supercomputer simulations of several billions of galaxies processed through a virtual observatory, providing tools and fundamental knowledge for observational, theoretical, and computational astrophysics.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 5101 - Astronomical Sciences. Lead: Prof Darren Croton

Uncovering the First Stars and Galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope. This project aims to find "First Light": the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Understanding the astrophysics of the first galaxies, their explosive growth, and how they set ablaze the remaining gas in the Universe have long been among the most important unsolved mysteries of astronomy. Decades in the making, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021 marks a watershed moment. This project uses privileged access to the revolutionary space telescope to find "First Light" and contribute to rewriting the first chapter of our cosmic history. The project is expected to significantly enhance Australia's international standing through leadership in use of the world's flagship scientific facility.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 5101 - Astronomical Sciences. Lead: A/Prof Ivo Labbe