Grants & Opportunities

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

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

The mechanistic basis of how bacteria respond to environmental change. The bacterial cell surface is the primary barrier that protects from external threats; however, it remains unclear how bacteria rapidly remodel this protective layer. This project aims to discover the mechanisms by which bacteria rapidly respond to changes in their local environment. The project expects to define these mechanisms using combinations of molecular analysis, cutting-edge nanoscale imaging, genome-wide profiling and AI-driven structural analysis. Expected outcomes are to understand this fundamental biological principle and advance our knowledge of bacterial cell biology and environmental adaptation. The findings from this project should provide significant benefits for the global research community and commercial biotechnology.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Lead: Dr Thomas McLean

Social, ethical and regulatory challenges in the social media porn industry. This project aims to map the social, ethical, and regulatory challenges for creators, audiences, and intermediaries in Australia’s emerging social media pornography industry. It will generate new insights into social media porn work, using qualitative methods that centre the experiences of porn creators and audiences. Expected outcomes include revealing the role of social media porn in Australia’s digital economy, and equipping policymakers and porn creators with information on the current landscape in Australia. This should provide significant benefits for government and the industry seeking to balance personal freedoms, economic growth, and legal oversight, as well as understanding porn creation as a form of digital sexual labour.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4701 - Communication and Media Studies. Lead: Dr Emily van der Nagel

Pollies in the Glossies: How Aussie Women’s Magazines Frame The Political. At a time when women's participation in politics is crucial, this project aims to explore the role of Australian women’s magazines in shaping political discourse. By combining archival research, focus groups and interviews, this project expects to generate new knowledge on how women’s magazines frame politics, how politicians use these platforms, and how they impact women’s political engagement. Expected outcomes include a website, exhibition, academic publications, and development of a documentary. The project will provide social and cultural benefits through a comprehensive analysis of political narratives in women’s magazines, enhancing public access to these histories and raising awareness of their political significance.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4405 - Gender Studies. Lead: Dr Blair Williams

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

Energy-Efficient Models for Sustainable Intelligent Software Engineering. This project aims to tackle the high operational costs and environmental impacts associated with software engineering tools powered by large language models. The project expects to develop novel and effective techniques to reduce energy consumption when the models are deployed for service. Expected outcomes of this project include new insights in software engineering with the creation of the first compact code representations, a domain-specific model distillation framework, and an adaptive dynamic inference management strategy. This should provide significant benefits to reduce both environmental impact and operational expenses, making the techniques more accessible, sustainable, and beneficial for scholarly, public, and commercial sectors.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4612 - Software Engineering. Lead: Dr Xiaoning Du

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

Innovating a new framework for Indigenous-led climate adaptation strategies. This Indigenous-led project aims to design climate adaptation strategies to help future-proof Australian communities. Collaborating with Indigenous knowledge holders, this interdisciplinary approach responds to calls from researchers for better integration of Indigenous knowledges to bridge the science-policy interface. With a case study in northeast Tasmania, this project will implement and advance an innovative framework, the Kin and Country Framework. Expected outcomes include the development of novel approaches to designing climate adaptation strategies applicable throughout Australia. Outputs include facilitator resources, academic publications and presentations, and activation of partnerships for wider implementation and translation.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4503 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Environmental Knowledges and Management. Lead: Dr Lauren Tynan

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

ARC Centre of Excellence for Prisoner Reintegration. Australia is gripped by a reincarceration crisis with 70,000 people exiting prison each year and half returning within two years of release. Using a strengths-based, First Nations and industry led approach, this Centre aims to fundamentally transform how prisoner reintegration is envisaged, practiced and achieved at scale. Expected outcomes include a world-first national database of successful reintegration scenarios, new metrics for measuring success, tools for building social licence, training of a world-class generation of researchers, and enhanced levels of social inclusion. With Australia's annual correctional budget approaching $7B, the Centre should deliver a major return on investment via real improvements in post-prison pathways.. Scheme: ARC Centres of Excellence. Field: 4402 - Criminology. Lead: Prof Mark Halsey

ARC Centre of Excellence for Transforming Human Origins Research. The Centre aims to transform our understanding of why and how our species, Homo sapiens, is the only surviving human on our planet. The Centre mobilises Indigenous, Global South and Western expertise to examine under-researched regions in Africa, Asia, and Australia. This novel synthesis aims to address how we became a versatile, global species, resilient to profound environmental changes over the last 300,000 years. Outcomes will include new scientific models and revisions to public education and policies about our history, our biological, and cultural relationships to one another, and how we have reshaped ecosystems worldwide. Benefits include a transformed, ethically engaged study of human origins for the betterment of society. . Scheme: ARC Centres of Excellence. Field: 4301 - Archaeology. Lead: Prof Michael Petraglia