ANU funding success for ARC Discovery Projects

Research into chicken farming, plant security and the ocean's role in climate change are among projects at The Australian National University (ANU) which have received federal funding.

Researchers from ANU received a total funding of $17 million across 31 projects in the latest round of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects scheme.

ANU Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) Professor Keith Nugent said he was pleased to congratulate the funding winners. 

"These researchers are ready to uncover fresh perspectives across diverse fields, such as understanding how plants react to high temperatures, enhancing plant resilience for upcoming climate changes, and examining the impact of large earthquakes on our planet," he said.

"The competition for ARC research funding is always fierce, and I'd like to congratulate the 31 Discovery projects who have been successful in this round. The ANU values pioneering research and is committed to fostering an environment that values innovation and the pursuit of knowledge."

ARC Chief Executive Officer, Ms Judi Zielke PSM, said the Discovery Projects would enhance the scale and focus of research in the Australian Government priority areas.

"Individual researchers and research teams will be supported by ARC funding to provide economic, commercial, environmental, social and/or cultural benefits to the Australian community," she said.

ANU projects to receive Discovery Project funding: 

• Professor Ian McAllister - Government popularity, political responsiveness and democracy in Australia, $476,138.
• Professor Colin Klein - Finding equivalence between natural and artificial intelligences, $435,598.
• Professor Sango Mahanty - Planet chicken: chemical entanglements in Asia's poultry boom, $672,233.
• Dr Simon Connor - Deep-time history of culturally significant lands and waters in Timor-Leste, $431,280.
• Professor Susan O'Connor - Investigating the world's first maritime network in Pleistocene Wallacea, $574,845.
• Dr Francis Hui - Modern statistical methods for clustering community ecology data, $401,287.
• Professor Lexing Xie - Interactions of human and machine intelligence in modern economic systems, $521,114.
• Professor Ian Petersen - Nonlinear quantum control engineering, $504,905.
• Professor Yuerui Lu - Harnessing interlayer biexcitons in atomically thin heterostructures, $614,114.
• Associate Professor Tamas Fischer - Nuclear RNA surveillance and its connection to splicing quality control, $507,424.
• Associate Professor Tegan Cruwys - Thwarted identity: the missing link between psychopathology and prejudice, $765,745.
• Dr Jinhu Li - Counter-COVID public policies and the impacts on Australian children, $546,194.
• Professor Anthony Licata - Stability conditions: their topology and applications, $419,421.
• Dr Kathryn Grasha - Exploiting James Webb space telescope observations of the first galaxies, $479,874.
• Professor Michael Ireland - Cubesat technologies for high spatial resolution astrophysics, $508,428.
• Professor Adrienne Nicotra - What determines plant sensitivity to heat?: Individual to lifetime impacts, $631,377.
• Professor Ulrike Mathesius - Improving grain legume seeds for future climates, $852,048.
• Professor Alexander Maier - Targeting the host lipid environment to disrupt malaria transmission, $664,654.
• Professor Peter Solomon - Characterisation of a novel disease immunity pathway in plants, $595,526.
• Professor Mark Humphrey - Mixed-metal clusters for catalysis and optical applications, $524,034.
• Associate Professor Zongyou Yin - Tuning catalyst reaction environments towards photoreforming of wastewater, $521,850.
• Associate Professor Nicholas Cox - Protein structure and dynamics by electron/nuclear paramagnetic resonance, $780,000.
• Dr Navid Constantinou - An ensemble approach to studying the ocean's role in climate change, $489,000.
• Professor Greg Yaxley - The carbonate geology of the critical metal niobium, $672,881.
• Professor Jochen Brocks - Molecular fossils, mass extinctions and the rise of complex algae, $589,870.
• Professor Louis Moresi - How large earthquakes change our dynamically deforming planet, $413,771.
• Professor Paul Tregoning - Tracking flood waters over Australia using space gravity data, $510,490.
• Dr Sean Hodgman - Quantum non-locality with mass-entangled metastable helium atoms, $521,166.
• Professor Murray Batchelor - Topological insulators and free fermions: from Hermitian to non-Hermitian, $460,905.
• Professor Andrew Truscott - Shedding light on the proton radius puzzle with ultracold helium, $460,950.
• Professor Benjamin Buchler - Atomic sensors for dark matter, rotation and magnetic fields, $375,628.

More details of each project available at the ARC website.