Grants & Opportunities

The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia: Phase 2. The Digitisation Centre of WA is a major piece of national research infrastructure with a prominent international profile. We will extend its digitisation capability, range and impact through adding 3D scanning capacity to the Centre. Partners hold invaluable and unique Western Australian type specimen, reference and taxonomic collections, not currently accessible to researchers due to their vulnerability and significance. Researchers must travel to Western Australia to view them. Using technology not previously available, we will build a 3D Object Scanning Laboratory with wide disciplinary reach, making collections nationally and internationally available for the first time and ensuring their preservation for future generations. . Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 4302 - Heritage, Archive and Museum Studies. Lead: Prof Helena Grehan

Inverse design of wave metamaterials for energy concentration. This project aims to develop an advanced topology optimisation framework for the automatic discovery of wave metamaterials for energy concentration. The project expects to digitally design materials that can achieve a wide range of frequency responses, addressing complex performance challenges that currently exist in waveguides, sensors, and energy harvesters. The expected outcomes include an efficient computational tool and optimization algorithms that integrate with additive manufacturing to enable the characterisation, design, and fabrication of the next-generation metamaterials. The research will contribute significantly to the sustainable development of Australia’s knowledge-based economy and commercial sectors.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4017 - Mechanical Engineering. Lead: Dr Weibai Li

Discovery of high affinity cyclic glycopeptides via GlycoRaPID mRNA display. This project aims to develop an efficient method for screening large peptide libraries with glycan modifications against carbohydrate-binding proteins called lectins. Using initiator tRNA and a new click chemistry technique for site-specific glycosylation, I will create diverse peptide libraries with defined glycan modifications. The method developed by the project will be validated by testing on specific lectins to find high-affinity glycosylated peptide ligands. This innovative approach overcomes longstanding challenges in ribosomal glycan incorporation, facilitating the discovery of a new class of molecules for medicinal chemistry applications. The project has the potential to boost Australia's pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3404 - Medicinal and Biomolecular Chemistry. Lead: Dr Yichen (Jessica) Zhong

Metal Isotope Facility for Advanced Research. This project aims to establish a reaction cell multi-collector mass spectrometry facility to enable a step change in research focused on novel isotope tracing of metals in geological, biological and man-made materials and settings. Expected outcomes of this project include new analytical capabilities such as online separation of elemental and isotope interferences via a reaction cell technology, which helps to overcome current analytical limitations and challenges for high-precision metal isotope measurements, radionuclide tracing and geochronology applications. This should provide significant benefits pertinent to resource exploration, ore processing, environmental and agricultural studies, as well as nuclear sciences and radiation safety.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 3703 - Geochemistry. Lead: A/Prof Juraj Farkas

Addressing long-term climate displacement in Australia. This project aims to investigate the long-term impacts of internal climate displacement in Australia and identify effective policies to support community resilience. It will generate insights into how climate disaster displacement impacts people’s social and economic stability over time. It will analyse the Australian policy landscape and global best practices to identify opportunities to improve resilience. This is significant given the lack of understanding of climate displacement in advanced economies. Expected outcomes include co-designed, evidence-based policy recommendations and interactive story mapping. This should benefit Australia by fostering an engaged policy network that can strategically address climate displacement.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4101 - Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation. Lead: Dr Colette Mortreux

Revealing the role of adaptive radiation in driving early animal evolution. This project aims to determine the importance of adaptive radiation—the rapid diversification of a group into a variety of ecological niches—in driving early animal evolution. New knowledge will be generated by synthesizing large fossil and palaeoenvironmental datasets, and using a new method of calculating morphological diversity through deep time. Expected outcomes include a greater understanding of the factors driving past diversification events, including how groups recover after major extinctions. Significant benefits include a new framework for analysing biodiversity in the fossil record, and highlighting Australia’s outstanding museum collections and geological record of early life.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3705 - Geology. Lead: Dr James Holmes

Mantle mysteries: exploring mineral system through experiments. This project aims to revolutionise mineral system models by investigating hydrous pyroxenites as alternative sources of critical metals like copper, cobalt, and platinum group elements. It challenges views that only peridotite contributes to ore formation. Using high-pressure experiments, geophysical imaging, and geochemical fingerprinting, the study seeks to enhance mineral exploration efficiency, particularly in Australia. The outcomes will provide new tools for identifying untapped metal resources, directly benefiting industry and net-zero efforts. Collaboration with industry and UWA ensures real-world application, while training a PhD student supports future expertise in mineral exploration and sustainability-driven geoscience research.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3705 - Geology. Lead: Dr Isra Ezad

Artificial aquatic ecosystems – sources or sinks of nitrous oxide? This project aims to determine the contribution of farm dams, canals, and urban ponds to human-derived nitrous oxide emissions: a greenhouse gas 270-times more harmful than carbon dioxide. It will investigate how nitrous oxide is produced and consumed by farm and urban waters and assess their potential to offset emissions by storing nitrogen and carbon. Findings are expected to provide crucial data to address the current gap in national and international emissions accounting, where human-made waterbodies are neglected. The outcome of this project will include a monetary evaluation of artificial waterbodies and the benefit will be management strategies to reduce nitrogen pollution and emissions in farm and city waters.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3702 - Climate Change Science. Lead: Dr Jackie Webb

Quality-Aware and Verifiable Data Valuation in Decentralized Networks. Unlocking fragmented data resources to enhance the fairness and trustworthiness of collaborations in decentralized networks is a vital challenge. This project aims to develop a quality-aware and verifiable data valuation framework for the challenge. The framework generates new knowledge in decentralized data ecosystems through innovative approaches to data representation, multi-dimensional quality assessment, and secure verifications. Project outcomes include theoretical advancements in data valuation and a prototype system demonstrating cross-organizational data collaboration. It strengthens national security and improves healthcare delivery by filtering malicious data and utilizing valuable data to build robust systems across the nation.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Jie Xu

Elder abuse and migration: Supporting safer ageing in Australia. This project will investigate how migration intersects with elder abuse to reduce the risk, impact and acuity of abuse for older migrants living in Australia. Using sociological qualitative methods, the project will deliver empirical evidence and theoretical understandings of how elder abuse is affected by migration policy, cultural factors, and transnational family dynamics. Expected outcomes include new knowledge about the lives of vulnerable older adults at risk of harm, and the kinds of community and service supports they need to age well. The project will deliver policy recommendations to support safer ageing in multicultural Australia and resources to inform both community members and professionals working in relevant sectors.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4410 - Sociology. Lead: Dr Catriona Stevens

Harnessing AI to Protect Endangered Languages. According to UNESCO, around 3,000 languages could disappear before the end of the century, at a rate of one every two weeks. This project aims to develop a computational framework to explore and document under-resourced languages. Adapting language models for high-resource languages, like Spanish or English, and linguistic resources available for smaller languages, like Indigenous Australian languages, the project will introduce innovative approaches to develop accurate, efficient, and compact models of language. The models will be incorporated into a tool for translation, analysis, and exploration of texts in under-resourced languages, providing insights on linguistic variation and supporting fieldwork and engagement with native speakers.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4602 - Artificial Intelligence. Lead: Dr Ekaterina Vylomova

How climate extremes shape plant microbiome functions and pathogen invasion. This project aims to investigate how extreme climate events impact the structure and functions of plant-associated microorganisms, which are essential for sustaining crop health. Climate extremes, such as heatwaves and floods, severely impact plant diseases and food security. Using advanced approaches and microbial analysis, this project will generate new knowledge about the responses of crop microorganisms to climate extremes and pathogen invasion. It expects to develop an innovative workflow for harnessing beneficial microbial traits to enhance plant health. This will provide novel microbial applications to boost plant resilience to climate change and pathogen threats and offer significant benefits to support sustainable agriculture.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4106 - Soil Sciences. Lead: Dr Chao Xiong

Building Deep Debate Evidence Systems for Youth Crime Policy Reform. This project aims to develop a reliable, equitable, and explainable deep evidence system to contribute to global debates on youth crime policy. This project expects to enhance transparency and fairness, aligned with Australian justice priorities, by mitigating bias and misinformation and ensuring legislative changes are backed by diversified evidence. Expected outcomes include AI-driven recommendations from scientific studies, public discourse, and social media via data engineering and data science. This should provide significant benefits to policymakers and communities promoting fairer justice reforms and strengthening Australia’s leadership in data governance by ensuring policy decisions are based on comprehensive, verifiable evidence.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Thanh Tam Nguyen

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

Agile Vision: Adapting Vision Foundation Models in Real-World Contexts. This project aims to develop an adaptive framework for vision foundation models to operate effectively in data-scarce, resource-constrained, and evolving environments. It expects to generate new knowledge in adaptive artificial intelligence by integrating data-efficient learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and latency-efficient inference techniques. The expected outcomes include enhanced deployment of vision models in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and industrial automation. This will provide substantial benefits, including increased AI efficiency in critical Australian industries, improved decision-making in dynamic environments, and strengthened sovereign AI capabilities aligned with the National AI Strategy. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Yanbin Liu

Tightness and stability of caprock fractures in geological carbon storage. The project aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying caprock leakage and seismicity when carbon dioxide is injected into geological carbon storage formations. Using state-of-the-art experimental protocols and numerical tools, the project will investigate the tightness and stability of fractures in caprocks representative of the Australian context. The expected outcomes include a fundamental understanding of the leakage and seismic risks associated with caprock fractures, the development of a framework for evaluating caprock fractures, and the formulation of injection strategies to minimize leakage and seismic risks. Overall, the project will provide significant benefits in advancing the decarbonization efforts in Australia.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4005 - Civil Engineering. Lead: Dr Yinlin Ji

Unravelling nocebo effects: the role of personal and social experiences. Nocebo effects - where negative expectations trigger adverse outcomes - cause significant personal, societal, and economic harm. This fundamental science project aims to use novel experimental methods to uncover the psychological mechanisms underlying nocebo effects acquired via social observation and direct experience, namely social dynamics, attention, and learning processes. Outcomes include a new evidence-based model of the nocebo effect, leading to improved identification of when and why these effects occur. Results will significantly advance scientific understanding of the nocebo effect, providing enormous benefit to the Australian community by paving the way for future translational research, reducing the cost of nocebo effects.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 5204 - Cognitive and Computational Psychology. Lead: Dr Kirsten Barnes

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

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

Shaping the future of work: improving work design in human-AI collaboration. Without appropriate work design, the integration of AI-powered tools into workplace will primarily focus on replacing human work. This project aims to reveal the fundamental role of mental model of technology in shaping work design, contributing to the development of work design theory within the context of human-AI collaboration. Anticipated outcomes include: a measure of mental model, a deeper understanding of the antecedents of work design from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, and intervention tools to mitigate biased mental models. Significant benefits include identifying feasible strategies to harness the respective advantages of both human employees and AI, thereby improving work effectiveness and well-being in the AI era. . Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3507 - Strategy, Management and Organisational Behaviour. Lead: Dr Bin Wang

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

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

Synthetic Technologies to Accelerate Peptide and Protein Production . Chemical synthesis of the 3D structures of peptides and proteins is a formidable challenge due to their susceptibility to shape alterations (misfolding), abolishing their biological function. This project aims to develop new methods to produce correctly folded peptides and proteins, accelerating the use of Australia's abundant natural biomolecules as novel therapeutics, agrochemicals, and biotechnological tools. Expected outcomes include the development of new synthesis tools and strategies that efficiently access complex molecules while reducing waste. This project will provide significant health, manufacturing, and economic benefits to the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors by enabling greener and more effective synthetic methods.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 3404 - Medicinal and Biomolecular Chemistry. Lead: Dr Andrew White

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

3D Printing Facility for Precision Micro & Nano Photonics. This project aims to create a 3D Printing Facility for Precision Micro & Nano Photonics that enables high-speed and precise fabrication of complex optical micro-structures with nano-scale features, ultra-smooth surfaces and high-accuracy alignment. This is expected to achieve seamless integration of optical fibres and photonic chips with each other and their environment, which is crucial for their practical deployment outside of well-controlled laboratories. Expected outcomes of the proposed facility include the convergence of multiple disciplines and the fostering of innovation, enabling research in quantum technology, secure communications, bioimaging, sensing, materials science and more—ultimately accelerating industrial translation.. Scheme: Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities. Field: 4009 - Electronics, Sensors and Digital Hardware. Lead: A/Prof Jiawen Li