Grants & Opportunities

Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) — the National Indigenous Australians Agency's primary federal funding programme for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Funds remote and regional community development, capability building, economic participation, jobs and social enterprise. Pty Ltd entities eligible. Multiple streams including Jobs Land and Economy, Children and Schooling, Safety and Wellbeing, and Culture and Capability. Goods on Country fits the Jobs Land and Economy stream as a First Nations social enterprise delivering essential household goods to remote Aboriginal communities.

Healing at Home on Country provides Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and for-profit Aboriginal businesses an opportunity to support culturally safe pathways for Aboriginal Adults returning home to their families and communities.

Support social enterprises to purchase capability building services to be more efficient and effective in delivering social benefits to vulnerable Australians. Strong representation from First Nations enterprises

This grant is open to Aboriginal people who are social housing tenants or private tenants and who have saved up at least $1,000 towards their deposit and are in the process of purchasing a home.

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

All-Optical Upgrade to the Adelaide Atom Trap Trace Analysis Facility. This LIEF will upgrade the University of Adelaide Atom Trap Trace Analysis facility with a state-of-the-art analysis system that incorporates new all-optical methods. The system will provide ultrasensitive measurement of trace argon and krypton gas for groundwater dating. The project addresses a global demand for measurements by increasing the capacity at the Adelaide facility and enables new applications through analysis of smaller sample volumes. It will benefit the Australian environmental and earth sciences by providing unique datasets, generating new knowledge into the flow and transport mechanisms of groundwater systems. It will address national water security and sustainability goals, and support growth of population and industry. . Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3707 - Hydrology. Lead: Prof Andre Luiten

Funds the establishment of micro-businesses in remote Aboriginal communities.

Grants supported by BHP for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to pursue professional, cultural, or personal development opportunities, including business development.

This grant is open to Aboriginal people who have saved up at least $1,000 towards their deposit and that are in the process of building or buying their home.

The Program will be offered to those new and emerging Aboriginal Governance Groups not already participating in the LDM Program and will provide capacity funding to those Groups enabling them to undertake community engagement and consultation.

The NSW Closing the Gap Partnership Ad Hoc Grant Round provides funding by invitation only to support initiatives identified under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap

LDM is an initiative of OCHRE: the NSW Government’s community-focused plan for Aboriginal affairs. LDM seeks to improve the relationship between government and Aboriginal people through agreement making on service delivery issues.

The purpose of the Minister’s Discretionary Fund (MDF) is to provide one-off grant funding at the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Treaty’s discretion, to support Aboriginal people and communities across NSW.

Grants are available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled with any tertiary institutions located in NSW. Applicants must be enrolled in study and demonstrate that they are in financial hardship to access the grants.

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

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

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

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

Developing novel two-dimensional hybrid nanostructures for renewable energy. This project aims to develop novel two-dimensional (2D) hybrid nanostructures with new physical and chemical properties. This innovation intends to address the critical challenges of control functionalisation of 2D hybrid nanostructures: essential to understanding the potential of nanomaterials in key applications of energy generation. Expected outcomes include scalable technology to produce functional 2D nanomaterials and hybrid nanostructures to accelerate research to advanced materials and frontier material manufacturing technologies. This project will provide significant social and economic benefits to Australia in the growth of sectors in advanced materials, energy generation, and advanced manufacturing.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 0912 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Prof Weiwei Lei

The future of shipping: achieving autonomous navigation. This project aims to develop autonomous decision systems and onshore control stations to support the design and operation of unmanned cargo ships. Blending observations, numerical models, virtual reality and machine learning, the project will develop algorithms for unsupervised navigation and embed these in an advanced ship simulator platform capable of responding to environmental conditions and optimising sea freight transport capabilities. The expected outcomes will enable the integration of automated controls in ships, including remote-control capabilities. This will support Australia’s transition towards an autonomous shipping industry, delivering greater reliability, efficiency, productivity and safety.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0911 - Maritime Engineering. Lead: Prof Alessandro Toffoli

Remote sensing techniques to infer fine-scale ocean surface currents. This project aims to develop new technology for measuring ocean surface currents at unprecedented fine resolution using aerial imagery and theory that describes how surface waves are refracted by currents. The project will generate new knowledge on ocean surface current processes and variability across a range of scales, and critically, improve our understanding of surface current uncertainty through application of advanced statistical analysis techniques. The outcomes of this project will deliver Australian capability to leverage the enhanced spatial and temporal resolution of next generation Earth observations to directly benefit search and rescue, offshore industry operations, defence, and pollution response in Australian waters.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0405 - Oceanography. Lead: Dr Matthew Rayson

Diamond-based wideband radiofrequency fibre-optic sensor. This project aims to address the growing problem of ultra-wide radiofrequency signal monitoring. Developing a rugged and portable solution for whole-spectrum monitoring is a critical unmet need for Defence and other industries, and an important scientific challenge. Our approach is based on a diamond radio frequency sensor with fibre-optic readout. The project is expected to generate knowledge in the areas of quantum science and photonics by integrating advanced optical fibres with quantum-grade diamond. Expected outcomes of the project include the development of a strategic academic and industry alliance through the establishment of a sovereign capability that will benefit Australia in the areas of cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 0204 - Condensed Matter Physics. Lead: Prof Brant Gibson

Scalable and Lightweight On-Device Recommender Systems. This project aims to address the resource-intensive and non-resilient nature of existing cloud-based personalised recommendation services. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the intersection of on-device machine learning and recommender systems. The expected outcomes include a novel auto-deployment platform that can efficiently customise a model for each user device's configuration, supporting on-device recommendation and model updates with tiny computational footprints. The benefits of these outcomes will position Australia at the forefront of AI and give numerous businesses the tools needed to deploy innovative business systems with a secure and cost-effective advantage.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Tong Chen