Grants & Opportunities

The new Community Film Festival Opening Night Fund will offer grants of up to $5,000 to established community-driven film festivals to enhance their opening nights and bring communities together to celebrate and connect through film.

The Fatal Crash Response Sub-Program is a component of the NSW Government’s Towards Zero Safer Roads Program, for the immediate delivery of low-cost interim road safety infrastructure improvements to roads following a fatal crash.

The Tech Savvy Seniors program provides older people in NSW with access to low-cost digital literacy training at all levels on the use of computers, tablets, smartphones, and online applications and cyber safety.

The purpose of the Legacy Infrastructure Fund (the LIF) is to provide funding for infrastructure projects that will deliver long-term and legacy benefits for local communities within the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ).

The program aims to enable discrete Aboriginal Communities in Northern NSW to develop emergency management plans and implement emergency management initiatives to build resilience to bushfires, floods, storms and pandemics.

The Supporting Young Scientists Equity and Access Program (Program) supports a diverse sector of NSW high school students who wish to further their education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Round one of the Faster Assessments Incentive Program rewards eligible councils for reducing and maintaining low average development assessment times during the 2024–25 financial year.

The Emerging Technology Commercialisation Fund (ETCF) is a key action of the NSW Innovation Blueprint, designed to accelerate the growth of the state’s innovation ecosystem.

The STEM Equity & Access Program 2026 (Program) supports a diverse sector of NSW high school students who wish to further their education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

The Regional Night-Time Economy Program is an integrated capacity-building and funding program. The purpose of the Program is to encourage local business collaboration and support the development of vibrant night-time economies in regional NSW​.

This program supports existing large-scale contemporary music festivals presented in NSW with a track record of delivering significant outcomes for contemporary music.

Supports delivery of NSW Government-endorsed plans and sector strategies for the creative industries. Eligible applicants demonstrate a proven track record delivering programs and services that achieve sector outcomes.

Funds life-saving heart research and supports community efforts to improve heart health.

Annual research grants for clinical neurosciences research projects. Open to researchers and research teams nationally.

The evolution of specialised orchid pollination and its reversibility. This project aims to determine the changes in key floral volatile compounds underpinning pollination transitions, identify their molecular basis, and understand the ecological processes favouring reversals away from extreme specialisation. By focusing on pollination of sexually deceptive Australian orchids, this project would be the first to determine the molecular, chemical and behavioural basis of evolutionary reversals to more generalised strategies in a group of plants facing high risk of pollinator extinction. The expected outcome, a mechanistic understanding of how pollination transitions occur, would be internationally ground-breaking, and provide crucial insights to protect this diverse but highly threatened group of plants.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0603 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: Prof Rod Peakall

Understanding disease resistance gene evolution across the Brassicaceae. Pan genomes represent the diversity of a species, including structural and sequence variation, which cannot be provided by a reference genome alone. In this project we will characterise resistance gene diversity across the Brassicaceae pan genomes. Through comparison with resistance gene diversity in cultivated Brassica species we will understand selection underlying resistance gene evolution in wild species and subsequent domestication and breeding. Knowledge on how variation affects disease susceptibility, especially to the devastating fungal pathogen blackleg, and contributes to phenotypic variation, will lead to improved plant protection strategies and increased crop resilience.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0604 - Genetics. Lead: Prof Jacqueline Batley

Raman Spectroscopic System for In-Operando Electrochemical Studies. This proposal aims to establish a Raman microscopic system with real-time tracking capability, which will allow investigation of the activities of battery components during charging. An instrument that allows this level of interrogation is currently not available in Australia. Expected outcomes include advanced knowledge for improved battery technology, which will meet the increasing demand of electronic applications and provide commercial opportunities in Australia. This system will be highly versatile and extendable to other fields of energy and materials-related research, providing high-quality training of researchers, as well as a platform from which to enhance materials research capabilities in Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 0906 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Wei Kong Pang

Founding an Australian Critical Zone Observatory Network. This proposal founds a new network of Australian Critical Zone Observatories. The network will fill essential knowledge gaps about interactions of under- and above-ground environmental processes and their responses to disturbance and change. These interactions determine the sustainability of food, clean water, mineral resources and Australian ecosystems, and cannot be studied with existing environmental infrastructure. The 5 foundational sites will host integrated monitoring equipment to observe stocks and fluxes of carbon, water, energy and mass across the “Critical Zone” – the vertical span from plant canopies to fresh bedrock. Joining a burgeoning international movement, the network will catalyse Critical Zone science in Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 0502 - Environmental Science and Management. Lead: A/Prof Sally Thompson

Efficient Multi-key Homomorphic Encryption and Its Applications. Multi-key homomorphic encryption (MKHE) is a key technology that functions to allow multiple users to supply their private input for collaboration in the cloud while keeping the user data confidential. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to obtain efficient MKHEs. This project aims to overcome this challenge by enabling novel efficient MKHEs. The expected outcomes of this project are to develop innovative cryptographic technologies which realise efficient MKHEs, together with their cryptographic libraries and practical applications in solving industry problems. This will provide direct economic benefits to Australian industry through the enablement of advanced technologies and low-cost business solutions which are developed in Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0804 - Data Format. Lead: Prof Willy Susilo

A home-centred approach to support children and young people in state care. This project aims to determine how conceptions of home can enhance an understanding of and responsiveness to young people’s needs in state care. It expects to generate novel data on home for young people in state care and for the first time develop a home-centred approach to supporting young people across multiple care contexts. Expected outcomes include developing and evaluating home-centred care principles, practice guidelines and an online training module. These should provide benefits including better experiences and placement stability for young people, effective training for carers and evidence-informed strategies guiding the work of service providers and governments, with the potential to improve young people's life chances. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 1607 - Social Work. Lead: Dr Kate Seymour

Predicting seed lifespan for improved curation of conservation seed banks. This project aims to improve the practice of seed banking for the conservation of the Australian flora. Recent evidence points to diverse and complex storage behaviour for wild seeds and to seeds of many species being shorter-lived than anticipated. Predicting seed storage behaviour and viability decline is central to effective seedbanking. This project expects to develop new high throughput technologies and data interrogation techniques for predicting seed lifespan in storage, and alternative storage protocols for problematic seeds. Results will allow seed bank managers to more efficiently triage and curate their seed collections and will benefit seed banks globally.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0502 - Environmental Science and Management. Lead: Em/Prof Philip Withers

Post-parental housing transitions among adults with intellectual disability. This project aims to address the urgent issue of growing numbers of older people with intellectual disability (ID) outliving their parent carers who have not put future care plans in place. This project expects to generate a national evidence-based framework for ensuring successful post-parental housing and care transitions. By using a three-phase mixed methodology design in three Australian cities, expected outcomes of the project include the development of an Australian-first evidence-based resource kit which should provide significant benefits for older people with ID, their family carers and the disability sector, in terms of planning for post-parental housing and care transitions.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 1117 - Public Health and Health Services. Lead: A/Prof Ruth Walker

Re-Evolving Nature’s Best Positioning Systems for People and Their Machines. The aim is to develop next-generation positioning capabilities that reduce Australia’s increasingly risky strategic reliance on vulnerable GPS satellites owned by other countries, and that enable transformation of Australia’s most important sectors through enhanced automation and robotics. Our approach re-evolves, re-engineers, and re-combines the best performing and best understood components of nature’s best positioning systems with new technological advances in sensing and computation. The expected outcomes are high-performance positioning systems that improve the competitiveness of Australia’s leading industries and provide the positioning reliability required by the defence sector to keep Australia secure.. Scheme: Australian Laureate Fellowships. Field: 0801 - Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing. Lead: Prof Michael Milford

Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate. Rapidly increasing partisanship and polarisation, especially online, poses an urgent threat to societal cohesion in Australia and other established western democracies; polarisation is also a critical cybersecurity concern when actively promoted by bad-faith actors to undermine citizens’ trust in democratic institutions. By introducing an analytical framework that distinguishes four key dimensions of polarisation, the Fellowship aims to conduct the first-ever assessment of the extent and dynamics of polarisation in the contemporary online and social media environments of six nations, including Australia. The evidence is expected to enable an urgently needed, robust defence of our society and democracy against the challenges of polarisation.. Scheme: Australian Laureate Fellowships. Field: 2001 - Communication and Media Studies. Lead: Prof Axel Bruns

Nanoscale-interactions making future functional materials more powerful . Traditional crystal chemistry can no longer meet the demands for development of new functional materials - the foundation of modern industry. The program aims to overcome this challenge by introducing a new strategy into experimental and theoretical research to transform our understanding and application of nanoscale structural and chemical features in materials. The program expects to build new crystal chemistry that includes nanoscale-interaction information and deep machine-learning to improve the predictability of material properties. Potential outcomes of the program include enhanced capacity for revolutionary materials development thus keeping Australia's leading position in innovative technology, benefiting academia and industry.. Scheme: Australian Laureate Fellowships. Field: 0912 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Prof Yun Liu