Grants & Opportunities

Policy transformations for compound climate disasters. This project aims to identify the capacity of Australia’s current and future disaster policy to address the needs of people who live through multiple climate disasters. Through a groundbreaking analysis that links policy, survivor experiences and the perspectives of policy actors, this project will generate new knowledge on how disaster services can be adapted from the current focus on ‘single disasters’ to better address overlapping, compound disasters. Expected outcomes include an inventory of new policy instruments and enhanced capacity to develop interventions. This should provide significant benefits for improving emergency management services for compound disasters, which are projected to increase with climate change.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4407 - Policy and Administration. Lead: Dr Claire Leppold

Tracking absorbable plastic contaminants in drinking water. This project aims to investigate the occurrence, sources, and removal of absorbable plastic particles (particles smaller than 10 µm) in drinking water. Using cutting-edge analytical techniques, it expects to identify and track plastic contaminants in Australian water supplies and evaluate the effectiveness of household filtration systems to remove them. The findings should inform regulatory standards, enhance water quality management, and support safer drinking water practices. By providing essential evidence for policymakers, water utilities, and consumers, this research should help mitigate plastic pollution risks and strengthen public confidence in drinking water safety. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4104 - Environmental Management. Lead: Dr Elvis Okoffo

Safeguarding sexual and reproductive rights online. Digital platforms can provide generative spaces for sexual expression, sex education and sexual health information, however online spaces are increasing hostile for sexual minorities, who face criminalisation and surveillance. Bringing together local and global stakeholders, including sexual health organisations, public interest technologists, human rights lawyers and affected communities, the project investigates how digital platforms can better safeguard sexual and reproductive rights online. Through participatory and creative methods, it advances a novel theoretical and evidence-based approach to sexual content moderation that reconceptualises online safety and improves platform and regulatory approaches to building safer sexual spaces.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4701 - Communication and Media Studies. Lead: Dr Zahra Stardust

Advanced Characterisation Facility for High Speed Quantum Devices. This project will provide critical new capabilities for the measurement and characterisation of advanced quantum devices and materials in a new multi-user Quantum Science and Industry Laboratory. It will leverage existing ARC and university funding to provide a unique new capability designed to serve the needs of users both from Australia's emerging quantum technology industries as well as academia. Expected outcomes include the creation of new intellectual property, local manufacturing of quantum control hardware, support for Australia's quantum industries, and training of researchers and workers for the burgeoning quantum technology sector which is predicted to generate $6 billion in revenue and create 19,400 jobs in Australia by 2045.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 5108 - Quantum Physics. Lead: Prof Alexander Hamilton

Fully Printable Low-Dimensional Perovskites for Sustainable Memory Devices. This project aims to create a new class of environmentally friendly, low-dimensional perovskites and pioneer inkjet printing techniques for multifunctional memory devices. These devices are designed to respond to both electrical and optical signals, opening up new opportunities for sustainable electronics. This project expects to yield fundamental insights into perovskite properties and memory mechanisms by establishing structure-property-performance correlations. Expected outcomes include novel device concepts and manufacturing approaches that can be scaled up. This should provide significant economic and societal benefits to Australia by supporting advanced manufacturing and positioning the nation at the forefront of memory technologies.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Dr Xinwei Guan

Corrosion-resistant catalysts for stable and scalable seawater electrolysis. This project aims to develop corrosion-resistant catalysts for stable seawater electrolysis, providing a robust solution to the critical challenge of anode degradation in chloride-rich environments. By combining advanced material synthesis, in-situ characterisation, and device integration, it seeks to enhance catalyst stability and efficiency in green hydrogen production. Expected outcomes include innovative synthesis methods, new insights into anti-corrosion mechanisms, and engineering breakthroughs from the molecular to industrial scale. This research will contribute to Australia’s renewable energy transition by advancing sustainable technologies and enabling large-scale green hydrogen production to support national net-zero targets.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4018 - Nanotechnology. Lead: Dr Feiyue Gao

Understanding cellular adaptation in microgravity with bioengineering tools. As humanity ventures further into space, understanding how cells adapt to microgravity is essential to expand the fundamental knowledge of life beyond Earth. This project will investigate how the absence of gravity alters key biological processes, including cell migration, tissue remodelling, and barrier function—essential for how cells organize, communicate, and adapt to their environment. Using advanced bioengineered models and microfluidic systems, we will identify gravity-sensitive pathways that drive cellular adaptation in extreme conditions. These discoveries will challenge current biological paradigms and redefine our understanding of how mechanical forces shape life in ways never before explored. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4003 - Biomedical Engineering. Lead: Dr Giulia Silvani

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

Building the sperm RNA profile: Mechanisms of acquisition and modulation. Paternal non-genetic inheritance has been shown to be driven by changing ecosystems in many species. Although RNAs have been identified as the primary non-genetic factor in sperm, contributing to fertility and breeding success, their modulation within the reproductive tract remains unclear. This project aims to address how environmental exposures alter the RNA profile of sperm prior to conception and impact offspring, generating new global knowledge in non-genetic inheritance. Expected outcomes include insights and biological strategies to respond to and mitigate the impact of our changing ecosystem. In the face of current unprecedented environmental shifts this will provide benefits to animals of conservation and agricultural significance.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3109 - Zoology. Lead: Dr Natalie Trigg

The first global currency: tracing early Indian Ocean cowrie shell networks. This project will apply innovative methods in archaeological science to investigate how cowrie shell money from the Maldives—the first global currency—emerged and sustained globe-spanning trade networks for millennia. It will deliver socio-cultural benefits by shedding light on the deep history of trade in our region and generating a better understanding and appreciation of the role of our Indo-Pacific partners in early global trade. The project seeks to engage with communities in India and the Maldives, strengthening regional relationships through collaboration and capacity building. To maximise impact, major findings will be disseminated through an international online exhibition to enhance global cultural awareness.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4301 - Archaeology. Lead: Dr Mirani Litster

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

Safeguarding Australia's most threatened plants in a drier and hotter world. This project aims to use physiologically-based models to assess threatened plants' risk of mortality in response to the combined effects of droughts and heatwaves. This is a critical issue in Australia, where climate change is intensifying hotter droughts and increasing extinction risks for many species. By disentangling drought/heat impacts on mature and young trees’ physiology, this study expects to better predict when, where and which species will experience mortality. Project outcomes will benefit tree-planting initiatives, by selecting appropriate species/sites; policy makers, by incorporating climate-change risk into conservation planning; and all Australians, by ensuring a future for our unique species in a drier and hotter world.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3103 - Ecology. Lead: Dr Ilaine Silveira Matos

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