Grants & Opportunities

An annual grant to support the creation, development, exhibiting, or staging of creative work that inspires, motivates, and challenges awareness and thinking about human rights, social justice, Aboriginal sovereignty, and environmental sustainability.

Minor grants of up to $2,000 for projects aligning with the foundation's objectives.

Funds research initiatives aimed at finding a treatment or cure for KAND.

Funds for student placements within the wool industry, supporting practical experience and industry engagement.

The Foundation, with sponsor Bondor Metecno, assists the Gallery in delivering this exhibition. The award celebrates diverse, high-calibre talent of artists living and working in the Northern Rivers, Tweed, and Gold Coast regions, including Bundjalung (First Nations) and emerging artist categories.

Heat transfer and fluid flow in geomaterials: Physics-inspired AI framework. Processes involving fluid flow or heat transfer are of critical importance in engineering applications (e.g., in dams, geothermal systems, oil & gas production). Though largely overlooked, microstructural features control these processes in geomaterials. This project aims to exploit advances in high-resolution 4D imaging to extract essential microstructural information to: 1) identify new parameters that better capture pore and particle properties, connectivities and pathways, and 2) develop advanced predictive analytics tools. This will improve fundamental understanding of the link between microstructure and fluid and heat flows at the engineering scale, and provide predictive tools to reduce risk and costs to industry.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0905 - Civil Engineering. Lead: Prof Guillermo Narsilio

Modern mathematics to unravel the birth of coherence in dynamical systems. This project aims to reveal the precise mathematical mechanisms underlying the emergence and disappearance of long-lived coherent features in dynamical systems. This project expects to generate new fundamental mathematics in the area of dynamical systems, using innovative operator-theoretic approaches to carefully tease apart the lifecycles of coherent structures. The expected outcomes of this project include new mathematical theory and computational algorithms to anticipate the genesis and destruction of coherent objects, which are key organisers of complex geophysical flows. This breakthrough mathematics should provide significant benefits, such as improved prediction of eddy transport and persistence of weather and climate patterns.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0102 - Applied Mathematics. Lead: Prof Gary Froyland

Chlorine Evolution Catalysts for Efferent Seawater Electrolysis. Seawater is the most abundant aqueous resource on earth that is readily accessible at very low costs, but yet to be directly utilised for production of hydrogen fuel and commodity chemicals. This project aims to develop cheap and plentiful carbon-based high performance chlorine evolution electrocatalysts for seawater electrolysis powered by renewable electricity to realise the production of hydrogen, chlorine and sodium hydroxide directly from seawater. The electrolyser can also be used to treat desalination brine while produce hydrogen and chemicals. The success of the project will set a firm technological foundation for seawater utilisation, which will add to Australian capability to meet future energy and environment challenges.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0306 - Physical Chemistry (Incl. Structural). Lead: Prof Yun Wang

Sustainable Hydrogen Production from Used Water. The project aims to address the pressing challenge of water scarcity in hydrogen production by developing an innovative approach of using used water as the feed for water electrolysis. The project will result in an in-depth understanding of the impacts of water impurities in used water on the performance and durability of water electrolysers, and develop guidelines for the design of highly durable water electrolysers and the operation and upgrade of existing wastewater treatment plants. The project will advance the practical applications of water electrolysis for scalable and sustainable hydrogen production and help Australia secure a leading position in the global emerging hydrogen economy.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0912 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Prof Xiwang Zhang

Constitutional Design & Democratic Resilience . Democracy is under stress worldwide. Both new and longstanding are seeing waves of democratic erosion. In many cases, this erosion is also taking new and more subtle forms, which are harder to detect than outright coups or suspensions of democracy – that is, they involve a form of “abusive constitutional change” that uses existing legal democratic norms and processes to subvert democracy from within. This Project will investigate the nature and scope of this problem of abusive constitutional change, as well as potential solutions through constitutional design. It will offer new theoretical insights for the field of comparative constitutional studies, and practical insights for policymakers in Australia and globally.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 1801 - Law. Lead: Prof Rosalind Dixon

Decentralised Collaborative Predictive Analytics on Personal Smart Devices. This project tackles the challenging problem of personalised predictive analytics with resource-constrained personal devices and massive-scale data. The knowledge to be generated concerns privacy, fairness, and resource efficiency in the era of Internet of Things. The expected outcomes include a collaborative learning paradigm for building personalised models on personal smart devices in open and fully decentralised settings. Privacy and model fairness are core tenets of the paradigm. Personalised predictive analytics is frontier research that will position Australia at the forefront of AI and give business the tools needed to deploy innovative business systems for market exploitation with a secure, equitable and competitive advantage.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 0806 - Information Systems. Lead: Prof Hongzhi Yin

Domestic and Family violence and border-related harm. This project aims to explore how Australia's migration system intersects with the experience of domestic and family violence for temporary visa holders. By drawing on the accounts of former temporary visa holders via interviews in Australia, Thailand, Vietnam and India, and examining the migration system and processes evident in formal accounts including coronial findings and sentencing judgements, the project expects to generate new knowledge about connections between migration systems and domestic and family violence. This should provide significant benefits by laying the ground for reform and recommendations to support policy makers and stakeholders more broadly to create better conditions for women’s safety.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 1602 - Criminology. Lead: Prof Marie Segrave

A Bayesian Approach to Distributed Estimation for Multi-Object Systems. This project aims to develop new signal processing techniques that facilitate autonomous technologies for environmental perception, with the ability to efficiently process large data volumes from multiple sensing modalities. Rapid advances in sensors and networks have led to a digital data deluge, from which extracting useful information presents new technological challenges and opportunities. To address this development, this project seeks to develop new distributed solutions for statistical estimation, which are specifically designed for dynamic systems with multiple object states, and are inherently scalable and robust. The potential benefits include new technologies for smart cities, autonomous infrastructure, and digital productivity.. Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 0906 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Lead: Prof Ba Tuong Vo

Advances in data integration modelling for infectious disease response. This project aims to develop powerful mathematical frameworks that integrate data from multiple sources to facilitate informed decisions in response to the threat of present, and future, infectious diseases. The project expects to generate new knowledge in mathematics by advancing the tools for incorporating multiple data sources into models of infectious diseases. The expected outcomes include enhanced capacity to predict spatiotemporal changes in transmission of infectious diseases. This project should provide significant benefits in the advancement of modelling techniques broadly applicable to infectious disease settings, which will be demonstrated for antimalarial drug resistance – a major threat to malaria elimination. . Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 0102 - Applied Mathematics. Lead: Prof Jennifer Flegg

Kids, bugs and drugs: Human-microbial relations in everyday family life. This project aims to investigate human-microbial relations in everyday family life within the context of escalating Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). While AMR is widely recognised as a potentially catastrophic global health threat, antimicrobials still feature prominently in families’ daily attempts to care for their health. Using innovative qualitative methods, this project expects to generate better understandings of how human-(anti)microbial relations are understood and negotiated in community settings in daily life. Expected outcomes include new knowledge in the field of health sociology and a crucial evidence base that will yield significant benefit by informing and enabling community-centred responses to the growing AMR threat.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 1608 - Sociology. Lead: A/Prof Katherine Kenny

Applying ecologically valid approaches to social cognitive ageing. Social functioning is a critical predictor of wellbeing, particularly in older age. This project aims to investigate how important social cognitive capacities, that lay the foundation for effective social functioning, are impacted by normal adult ageing. This project will use cutting edge experimental techniques to investigate, for the first time, how ageing alters our capacity to visually attend and understand emotional information in others during real time social interactions, both in and out of the laboratory. Expected outcomes include new knowledge of how older adults navigate social interactions, with potential to lay a foundation for improving social wellbeing in older Australians.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 1701 - Psychology. Lead: Dr Sarah Grainger

Next generation Floating Structures with High-Performance Composites. Floating structures are facing severe deterioration problem due to steel corrosion. This project proposes to address the deterioration problem by developing prefabricated high-performance fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP)-ultra-high performance cementitious (UHPC) composite elements for future floating structures. FRP-UHPC composite elements have excellent strength-to-weight ratio and improved durability. Basic mechanical properties and durability of FRP-UHPC composites will be investigated. Also, reliable connection device for FRP-UHPC structural units will be proposed and verified. The project is expected to provide durable floating structures with low maintenance cost, leading to a revolution of the current floating structures.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 0905 - Civil Engineering. Lead: Dr Jun-Jie Zeng

Making Australia resilient to airborne infection transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that basic questions regarding how to minimise the risk of airborne infection transmission for any respiratory viruses remain unanswered, despite their frequency and huge social and economic costs. Therefore, this project aims to expand scientific knowledge and develop practical tools to improve the resilience of Australian indoor environments against airborne transmission of respiratory viruses. The outcomes of the project conducted by a multidisciplinary international team of collaborators will include: (i) quantitative knowledge on virus-laden aerosols from human expiration; and (ii) exposure and infection risk models and their application to typical indoor building and transport scenarios.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 1117 - Public Health and Health Services. Lead: Prof Lidia Morawska

Sustaining intensive agriculture through droughts and floods. This project aims to develop state-of-the-art conceptual and numerical models of river-soil-groundwater interactions to address complex and persistent questions on water sustainability in the Lower Burdekin Delta, Queensland, where groundwater pumping to irrigate sugarcane has been supplemented by artificial recharge for over 50 years. This project expects to deliver new knowledge of critical aquifer processes to inform the scheme operation, the largest in the country. Expected outcomes include ground-breaking management plans for the aquifer-replenishment scheme. Anticipated benefits involve balancing the needs of agriculture and the protection of pristine environments, including groundwater discharge to the Great Barrier Reef. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0406 - Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience. Lead: Prof Adrian Werner

Fabrication of silicon solar cells in a Lunar-like vacuum environment. In-situ power generation on the Moon is essential for the advancement of space exploration and habitation. At present this involves transportation of solar cells to the Moon. This proposal aims to pave the way for manufacture of solar cells on the Moon from Lunar materials. Utilising the future extraction and purification of silicon, abundant in lunar regolith, the project will focus on fabrication of silicon solar cells. This will provide power for: water mining, oxygen extraction, vehicles and habitats on the Moon and delivery of materials to Low Earth Orbit. The proposed research aims to develop solar cells that can be manufactured on the Moon, using materials abundant there, and techniques exploiting the natural vacuum of space.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0906 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Lead: Prof Gavin Conibeer

Beyond the limits of corrosion detection in inaccessible areas. The project will develop a new technology for medium-range corrosion mapping in inaccessible areas of infrastructure. This will overcome the limitations of existing corrosion inspection techniques for corrosion inspection at inaccessible areas. The project will create a new concept and generate new knowledge on accurate corrosion mapping in inaccessible areas. The expected outcomes are significant improvements in the capability and practicability over existing corrosion inspection technologies adopted by industry for a wide range of infrastructure, in particular the Oil and Gas, Mining, Energy and Water infrastructure, as well as improving the reliability and cost-efficiency of the corrosion inspection.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0905 - Civil Engineering. Lead: Prof Ching Tai Ng

Transfer Learning for Genome Analysis and Personalised Recommendation. This project aims to improve the accuracy, adaptability, and comprehensiveness of health characteristic predictions and provide personalised recommendations for healthcare service and disease prevention. The deliverables include uncertainty learning and multi-source transfer learning methodologies for predictions based on genome analysis that distils and transfers useful knowledge from multiple sources into an Australian genome analysis model. A federated cross-domain recommender system will be developed to profile individuals and generate personalised recommendations. The outcomes are expected to create a paradigm shift in learning-based prediction and personalised recommendations to support healthcare services in complex environments. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0801 - Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing. Lead: Prof Jie Lu

Robust and Scalable Autonomous Landing for Drones. The aim of this project is to develop a transformative robust and scalable autonomous landing system for drones. This is the critical missing technology needed to unleash exponential growth in a potentially enormous drone delivery industry by enabling a multitude of applications to deliver goods and supplies via drones to a wide range of destinations in Australia and the world in a timely, flexible and accurate manner. Such an autonomous landing solution would revolutionise drone technology, and propel Australia to the forefront of technology innovation. This project would benefit not only large scale delivery by drone in urban and suburban areas of Australia but also long distance delivery via drone to remote areas of Australia.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0805 - Distributed Computing. Lead: Prof Richard Han

Novel governance for marine ecosystems in rapid transition. This project will develop the governance knowledge required to manage rapidly changing marine ecosystems. Australia has the third largest marine estate globally, and its ecosystems support critical economic and sociocultural values. However, human pressures are tipping marine ecosystems into alternate states, inspiring new interventions to sustain industries and communities. New interventions necessitate transitions in governance. Expected outcomes include a comparative understanding of novel marine interventions now underway globally, and practical guidance on how to diagnose and implement responsible marine governance. Significant benefits include enhanced governance and sustainability of Australian and international marine ecosystems.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0502 - Environmental Science and Management. Lead: Prof Tiffany Morrison

Elliptical nozzles: the shape of silence? This project aims to leverage the aeroacoustic properties of elliptical nozzle geometries to significantly reduce installed jet noise. This project expects to generate new knowledge regarding methods to reduce installed jet noise, a serious problem for the aerospace industry. Regulatory constraints inhibit the implementation of efficiency-increasing configurations but still fail to eliminate public health impacts. Expected outcomes include a set of tools for optimizing nozzle designs capable of significantly reducing installed jet noise. This will provide significant benefits, as jet noise is a serious health issue for the Australian public. This project represents an opportunity to reduce its impact while improving fuel efficiency.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0915 - Interdisciplinary Engineering. Lead: A/Prof Daniel Edgington-Mitchell